I had never wanted to join a sorority; I never thought it was for me. With that said, I am so happy that I did. I found my best friends in my chapter that was genuinely dedicated to philanthropy and friendship. Somehow, I did end up exactly where I belong. So why do I want to talk about this then? Well, I think it’s interesting to analyze sorority recruitment in a nature versus nurture way. By this, I mean did I really fit into my sorority because of who I was, or did I become who I am because of my sorority? I think a lot of girls might be thinking the same thing, or they at least should be.

 

I was in a unique position for recruitment. I was an active member only once during recruitment, junior year I was a recruitment counselor, and senior year I was the VP of Accountability for the Panhellenic Executive Board. This position involved serving on the Panhellenic Recruitment Team. I knew all about sorority rules and a little bit about how chapters ran their recruitment. 

 

The most basic thing to understand about sorority recruitment is that the chapters know who you are before you even walk through the door. They have studied your recruitment application and have now attempted to pair you with someone they think you’ll get along with. In theory, this makes sense; it’s probably the best way to get the best conversations. I can’t speak to how each chapter goes further into the process, but this is what happens at the most basic level. You then have about a 5-20 minute conversation with different girls the sorority thinks you’ll get along with throughout the week (the conversations get longer as the week goes on). Sororities then claim to create these lifelong friendships because, as I said of myself earlier, everyone finds where they belong. 

 

There are a few things about this process that I find interesting. For one, I always found it hard to believe that people create genuine friendships from these conversations. While I admired the girls I spoke to during recruitment and thought each of them was excellent, I actually ended up in an entirely different friend group within my sorority. The girls who are the reason I joined ended up not being the ones I was the closest to. This could be looked at in various ways. From a positive perspective, this means that there were likely many girls in my sorority that I would get along with. When you look at this situation from a different angle, it’s possible that the girls you speak to throughout the week wouldn’t be who you associate with in the chapter anyway! So, if you dropped a chapter based on only those conversations, you might have missed out on speaking to your future best friends!

 

At my school, there were about 200 girls in each of the eight chapters. Two hundred people. The odds of you finding at least one person in every chapter that you got along with were significantly high. So then would people say that you should choose the chapter where there are the most girls that you really get along with? Put simply, yes, that’s exactly what you should do. However, then you pick the chapter that has predicted who you would like the best and you are only picking from 8-12 girls you meet throughout recruitment. Isn’t it weird that we have to pick our chapter based on who the chapter chooses to present to us?

 

Every year I would hear the Panhellenic Recruitment Team tell the PNMs that it is their process, but it’s not. They were required to go to every house, their schedules were created for them, and, though they ranked the chapters, they only went back to places that wanted them. Consider this - it is described as mutual selection, but if a chapter doesn’t want you that outweighs if you want them. That doesn’t sound like a mutual selection to me. 

 

At this point, you might be wondering what the solution is. My answer - fraternity rush. This sounds crazy, I know. But I do believe their process was better than Panhellenic, at least at my school. The freshman boys pretty much started out socializing with fraternities right away despite my school having a spring semester rush schedule. This meant that the boys had all semester to talk with various members of the different fraternities to see which one they fit into. They got to choose which houses they went to and when and who they spoke to when they got there. This was technically considered dirty rushing, but almost everyone knew that it was happening, and no one did anything to really try to stop it.

 

I’m not suggesting that sororities should start hosting parties on weekends and invite freshmen, but I do think that this sort of semester-long recruitment schedule can be beneficial. For example, from being on the recruitment team side of this process, I have seen girls drop out of recruitment when they only had my chapter left. I was once asked if it bothered me, and the answer is that I actually preferred when this happened. If they were not willing to give a “low-tier” sorority a chance because of the few people they spoke to that week or because of the stereotypes they’d heard about us, then I didn’t want them in my sisterhood. 

 

A semester-long recruitment process would allow girls to pick which houses they wanted to attend and would save many chapters time since they would only have to consider the girls who were showing up for their events. Sororities could host different philanthropy and sisterhood events to show the PNMs what they do together instead of just telling them. Let’s get rid of the phony sisterhood videos where chapters hire videographers and force their members to participate to show how great and fun their chapter is. What if we actually let the girls experience it for themselves?

 

Of course, the next question is how do you monitor this? What are the rules? And that’s the best part - there are none! Or at least not nearly as many as we have now. No alcohol, no boys, no gifts, don’t have more than a 2:1 ratio when speaking to a PNM, don’t go over budget on balloons, don’t even comment on a PNM's Instagram even if you’re friends! So many crazy rules that are nearly impossible to monitor, let alone be consistent with them. The real question is… why does any of this matter? Why do we feel the need to police young women this way? 

 

Panhellenic seems to want to pretend that sororities are more than just partying and booze and boys; in many scenarios, they are. But boys and booze and partying also tend to play a large role in sorority life, so what good is it to eliminate it from the recruitment process and pretend it doesn’t exist? 

 

I say that we should give both chapters and PNMs more time to get to know each other in real-life scenarios! Remove the pressure of the outfits, hair, and makeup. Give people who don’t make great first impressions or might be a little bit more introverted a chance. Encourage real friendships to develop before girls join the chapter! How crazy would it be to be screaming and yelling with your sisters on bid day because they’re actually some of your best friends?

 

I wouldn’t change my sorority experience for the world, but that doesn’t mean I can’t be critical of the system. There are many very obvious flaws in the recruitment system, and I know that this proposed system also has its issues (prolonged anxiety, less of an equal opportunity, increased importance of connections), but there are ways to combat all of these issues and there are counterarguments against the reality of each one. 

 

I know it’s still not perfect, but I think a conversation needs to be had. 

I’m sure I’ll be back with moore thoughts on sorority life. Until then,

Elizabeth