Andi

This post is about a week late, but I still wanted to share my experience with formal sorority recruitment!

Going through formal recruitment was probably more stressful than my classes were. You go from house to house, and I’m going to just be honest here, but I knew they were judging me and I was judging them, and a large portion of that was on appearance. In each round you want to put your best foot forward, and wear your best outfit. You have the same conversation a hundred times, but you still need to be personable and be able to hold that conversation. Eventually I came up with a kind of speech. I knew exactly what to say for each question and where I would go with it in order to kinda of lead them towards another question I had a good answer to.

The first round was pretty simple. You wear some (cute) casual clothes and visit all 14 chapters on campus. You answer the same questions over and over again.

1. Name
2. Major
3. Hometown
4. Dorm
5. Hobby

Take that times 14 houses, and again by 3-4 girls at each house. It got pretty redundant. I was still enjoying myself and I was excited to start the process, but having the same conversation gets really old.

Round 2 you dress just a tad bit nicer, and you stay at each house a little bit longer. This round you could only visit a max of 11 houses. Some girls got all their top choices, while others only got their bottoms. But I encourage anyone who gets their bottom to visit the houses again and give them a second chance rather than dropping out of recruitment all together.

Round 3 girls typically wear sundresses and wedges. This round you could only be asked back to a max of 7 houses, and you stayed at the house even longer than round 2. So about 45 minutes. This time it wasn’t the same old conversation. Instead of them drilling you with questions you got learn a little bit more about them as a sorority and ask some questions yourself.

In the last and final round you could be asked back to a max of 3 houses. You dresses in cocktail/church attire and stayed outside their house for an hour. This is when you really bonded with the girl talking to you, and instead of talking to 2-4 girls, you only really talked to one. Each chapter typically performs one of their rituals for you to demonstrate what being in that chapter would be like. After that you rank your top and bottom choices, it’s on to BID DAY!

Bid Day is the day you discover which chapter you will become a new member and/or pledge to. Its so nerve-racking! All you want is your top choice, and you couldn’t imagine yourself in another house. I was lucky enough to receive my top choice! I’m going to withhold all my opinions of other houses and what chapter I’m in, but that’s just to prevent stereotyping. Anyone looking to join a sorority, I highly encourage it. If you’re not sure, give recruitment a shot, and if you still don’t like it a round or two later you can easily drop out and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Sorry for such a long post, but a lot goes on with formal sorority recruitment!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 14th, 2011 at 11:11 am and is filed under General, . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.