Spring Rush Fever

Mattie Hanson
Phi Delta Theta

This article won’t be published until the fourth week of January, but I’ve just got to say that there’s something so weird about the beginning of spring semester for men in the Greek system.

For everyone else, it’s a frantic race to get Coachella tickets (congrats to those of you who scored them) and book spring break plans (I’ll be in Hawaii, myself), but for the men of USC fraternities, January is all about spring rush.

I don’t think girls in sororities can really understand why spring rush is so different from its fall counterpart, but in reality they play a large part in the difference. First of all, we’ve got Welcome Back nights. Now potential rushees aren’t supposed to be on the row in the week before rush starts, but spring pre-rush presents the possibility of more girls than pre-rush in the fall because there’s no spring rush for girls. Word spreads, and a successful pre-rush party can be very influential in the quality of a house’s rush.

Second of all, the stakes are a little bit higher in the spring. A lot of guys come out to rush in the fall, then choose to wait until the spring to pledge just because they can. For second-semester freshmen, this is the last chance a lot of them will have to pledge before their schedule gets too busy sophomore year. There isn’t as much time for the rushees to visit different houses, and they have to rely on a combination of hearsay and personal judgment to decide which houses they’re going to rush early in the week. Also, the absence of the fall barbecue makes House Tour Day so much more important. By Monday of rush week, you better have a pretty good idea of the top two or three houses you’re interested in.

If you’ve never seen the YouTube video “West Coast Fraternity Rush Report,” go watch it. It’s a hilariously accurate look at what rush meetings can be like for fraternities, and it’s my opinion that spring rush is even more vicious than fall. If fall rush went well and a house got a decent number of pledges, they might be able to be pickier with the size and quality of their spring pledge class. This is the ideal position to be in. Conversely, if your house suffered from a poor fall rush, spring doesn’t leave you with too many choices to fix the problem, since spring classes are historically smaller than fall classes.

Spring also introduces a number of events that affect pledging differently than the fall. Although the lack of football games means less time spent setting up for tailgates, spring semester promises weekly SongFest practices, Fratty Fridays, new exchanges and the greatly anticipated spring formal. The spring pledge semester is so different from the fall semester that the two might as well be different years entirely. I’m close to everyone in my house; the guys in my year especially. But no matter what, there will always be a difference between my pledge class and the spring pledge class of my year.

By the time you’re reading this article, blue chip dinners have happened, bids have been handed out, and pledges have (hopefully) been recruited. It’s the beginning of what has the potential to be a fantastic semester. The Row is off social probation, the Coachella line-up is killer, and there’s something in the air that says it’s a semester for some crazy stuff to go down. Get ready for it.