As summer is winding down to a close, sorority life is just starting up in full swing. With recruitment time just around the corner for my school, I thought I'd write about my own recruitment experience.
I go to a small school with only four sororities. Because of this, we recruit the first week of classes and we visit all four houses on open house instead of choosing which chapters we visit, as some larger schools do.
I had my heart set on one specific chapter. I have a cousin who was the president of her chapter when she was in college and she was the only reason I decided to recruit. I remember going into open house night and thinking to myself, "This is the place for me! I loved all the girls I talked to and everyone was so nice!" It was the third party I attended and I had already decided the two before were just not right for me.
By the last party, I knew I what I wanted. I wanted to be in my cousin's sorority. I had made sure to keep an open mind, though. I decided that the fourth house could also be my future home, if my first choice didn't work out.
Well, the next night was Philanthropy Night and I anxiously awaited my schedule, hoping and praying that the my three top picks would be left. When my Pi Chi (disaffiliated women who help Potential New Members [PNMs] through recruitment) handed me my schedule, I had to fight back tears. Instead of finding three parties and one dropped house, I had one party and three dropped houses. I can't say this was easy for me to see. I went over to my Pi Chi and asked her if this was normal. I knew things like this happened at really big schools like UGA because so many women went through recruitment there, but at Mercer? How could this have happened? After what seemed like an hour long conversation, I finally felt okay and went through with the night as planned.
I worried during classes the next day, however. I thought "What if I didn't impress my one house? What if they drop me? I have no back up!" I'm pretty sure I didn't learn anything that day in my classes. All I remember is the fear of being rejected.
I wasn't rejected. I was invited back to that house and eventually got a bid from them. The house was Alpha Gamma Delta. My second choice.
I found my home in a group that fit my personality and values. I thought that I wanted to follow in my cousin's footsteps and join her sorority, but I discovered that the women in the Mercer chapter were not like me at all. We had different values and different interests and the women recruiting me realized this. They saw the qualities of an Alpha Gam in me and thought I would fit better in that sorority than theirs. This is one of the reasons you might be dropped. The women know what they're doing.
One of the things my Pi Chi explained to me was that I needed to trust the "system." Recruitment works through a mutual selection process. The houses choose you and you choose them, as well. "Trusting the system" becomes a sort of mantra throughout recruitment and it seems like a cliche phrase. And it can be. But a lot of times, cliches arise from truth. That's what happened here. You truly need to trust the system. If you don't, you'll end up pretending to be someone you're not because you joined a group that isn't like minded.
Being in a sorority has been one of the best experiences I have had in college and I am so grateful for the lessons it has taught me. I learned to "trust the system" in other aspects of my life as well. If there's a system, chances are that it works and that it's there for a reason. This is what I learned from my recruitment experience. Trust the system, and everything will turn out okay in the end.
