Joining Sorority Life is one of the best things I could’ve ever done for myself… but disaffiliating from it is too.
For the past two summers, I’ve served on the Panhellenic Council. This basically means that our team spent all semester planning Formal Recruitment (Rush Week), which happens the week before classes start. While picking themes, designing t-shirts, and meeting all of the new girls is fun, there’s a catch: we have to disaffiliate from our own sororities for a whole summer. No letters on our cars, no wearing t-shirts with our letters on them, and no talking to ANY Greek women for the week prior to and throughout Formal Recruitment.
While disaffiliating from our own sororities was nothing easy, it was SO incredibly worth it in the end. We began the summer as 21 girls from all different sisterhoods, but later formed an amazing sisterhood of our own.
Experiencing recruitment from the Panhellenic side is very special. Instead of focusing on the girls we want individually, we get to form relationships with all PNMs (potential new members), and help them find their homes. Instead of practicing conversations over and over prior to recruitment, we get to take PNMs out to eat, play capture the flag with them at night, and really form actual friendships instead of only talking to them for a short amount of time each day. We got the opportunity to be these girls first friends at Jacksonville State. We guided them throughout the crazy week of Formal Recruitment. We helped them pick out which shoes to wear, which dress to wear, and ultimately… which sorority they would call home for the next four years.
After doing Formal Recruitment as an affiliated sorority woman and a disaffiliated Panhellenic woman, I will say that recruitment on the sorority side is easier. They don’t have to explain to girls what it means when they don’t get invited back to parties or see the look on their faces when they open their bid cards on Bid Day and see that they didn’t get a bid from their top choice. It definitely puts things into a different perspective.
After returning to my sorority on Bid Day, I realized how differently I look at things now. Instead of getting caught up in who’s the best sorority, who has the best t-shirts, or has the most fun… I realized that all sororities here are the same in a lot of ways. Everyone has the same drama, the same issues, everything. Instead of trying so hard to be the best, I now realize the importance of working together as one BIG sisterhood instead of several different ones.
I like to think serving on the Panhellenic Council has made me grow up and understand what is important and what is not. Looking back, I can’t believe I used to get so caught up in sorority drama. I wish everyone could experience recruitment on the Panhellenic side just one time to see how life changing it is.