I’ve been lurking around GC for the last few months, and tonight I finally decided to stop lurking and actually make an account. I initially found GC when I was searching around for information about sorority life as I was deciding whether or not to go through recruitment. I’d like to thank you all for the wealth of information you have posted here; it truly helped me make the decision to go through recruitment, and seeing the enthusiasm here about Greek life has made me so excited about my sorority, both now as a collegian and in the future as an alumna. Some of my favorite threads to follow have been recruitment stories, so I thought I’d post my own! I know you guys don’t like to wait forever on these, so I’ll post a couple parts of the story right now and then post the rest tomorrow morning.
I have to start with my initial perception of Greek life when I started my freshman year. I don’t have a whole lot of Greeks in my family (the only ones are on my stepmom’s side of the family, and I never really talked about it with them until I pledged). My mom didn’t exactly hold a high opinion of Greeks. She used to be a professor at the school I now attend, and she said that while she did have a few nice sorority girls in her classes (her field is predominantly female), she thought most of them seemed stuck-up, cliquey, and not exactly focused on academics. (Fortunately, my sorority experience has proved her wrong.
) I had a high GPA in high school and while I enjoy hanging out with friends, school comes first.
I started school this fall with this view of Greeks. I’ll be honest, I thought that they mostly just drank and partied. This would be especially true at my school; I go to a relatively big state university (I won’t say where for privacy reasons) where Greek life and partying are prominent (not necessarily together but there are a lot of Greeks that party). I also don’t like to party, so I was convinced that I would never want to join a sorority. I wasn’t the “sorority type.”
In one of my classes last semester, however, I got talking one day with a girl I went to high school with who had joined a sorority. In high school, I NEVER would have thought she’d join a sorority (again, going off of that previous perception). She told me, though, that her family told her she should at least go through recruitment to see if she might like to join a sorority, and she’s SO glad she did because she loves her sorority. She told me that sororities really aren’t stereotypical like everyone thinks they are. I also met a girl on my floor who had joined a sorority and loved it. She told me about her chapter and how much she loved being in a sorority and, again, how much it didn’t fit the stereotype. After talking to them, I realized I had no idea what a sorority was actually like and that I should at least do research about it before condemning them and saying I wouldn’t want to join one.
During this time (a month or so), I talked with other girls I knew who were in sororities and I looked online for information as well. I also talked with my stepmom about her experience in her sorority. She told me she really enjoyed her sorority experience, and she encouraged me to try it. She told my dad that I was thinking about going through recruitment, and while he was initially hesitant about it, he came around and supported me through it. My mom, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly as easy to talk to about it. She stuck with her initial view of sorority girls and didn’t think I’d fit in a sorority. She told me she would support me in what I wanted to do but she didn’t understand why I wanted to join one. (Fortunately, now that she’s seen how much I love my sorority, she’s much more supportive of me. She sees that it hasn’t changed me at all [except that it’s given me more opportunities to make friends and participate on campus] and that not all sororities fit the stereotype she held to.)
After a fair amount of research, I decided I wanted to go through recruitment. I decided to try informal first for 2 reasons: informal would give me an opportunity to meet the houses in a more relaxed setting, and I didn’t want to wait several months for formal in order to see if I even wanted to join a sorority. Throughout informal, I kept reminding myself to keep an open mind about the houses in order to know that I was joining the right house (and because the few rumors I’d heard had nothing to do with how well I’d fit into a house).
I went to my campus panhellenic office to ask about informal. They told me that 2 houses (out of several; I won’t say exactly how many chapters are at my school for privacy reasons, but there are many more than 2),
Portable Television and
What Sarah Said, were about to do informal. The codenames, as well as my username, come from some of my favorite songs by Death Cab for Cutie: “Portable Television,” “What Sarah Said,” and “You Are A Tourist,” respectively. At my school (I don’t know if this is the way a lot of schools do it), each house does informal whenever they want to/need to.
Portable Television’s informal was first and it was only a couple days away!
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