Recently, the headliners have been bad. Really bad. They have made it out to seem like we are reckless party animals who are ruining the university and its image. They are making it out to seem like we do not care about the safety of our members and fellow Greek members. They are making it out to seem like we do not have pride in our letters. Yet, they are not taking a closer look into each chapter. They are letting the negative things outshine the positive. They are holding the stereotypes of Greek life over our heads, not even trying to see how far we have come to diminishing them.
Even though we have had our troubles, not even denying that, we have come so far to break away from that stigma and truly represent what Greek life is about as an entire campus. On April 3rd, at least 800 Greek members participated in Greek Day of Service which had several service locations around the Morgantown area for students to better our community, like Habitat for Humanity or helping a local animal adoption center which was planned all by our members. On the week of April 3rd through 8th, we held the annual “Greek Week” which pairs sororities and fraternities together to compete in games and take part of different service activities to see which one can come out on top. Every chapter has just recently been through a Title IV presentation which made us more aware of their presence on this campus and showed us how we can take action to protect ourselves and fellow students to make our campus safe.
Two Greek leaders have just been elected Student Body President and Student Body Vice President, along with many other leaders being elected on the Board of Governors to lead our school forward. April is the time for many philanthropies to take place, like Tau Kappa Epsilon’s t shirt fundraiser for St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital and Sigma Phi Epsilon’s soccer tournament for the sororities to raise money for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. Kappa Kappa Gamma and Pi Beta Phi just recently paired up together and held a Lemonade for Literacy event that took place in the free speech zone of the Mountainlair where they handed out free lemonade to make students more aware of literacy across America and how we have the ability to change it.
All of these events have been taken place within the last month. One. Month. And that’s not all of them. Greek students are doing so many wonderful impacting things in our community and it needs to be recognized, not the mistakes that students make that are just human error. I hope one day the good that people do can finally be seen as outnumbering the bad. Yet, we can’t wait for it to happen. We can make the change. We can start the chain reaction. We, as college Greek students, can go out there and show how good of people we are and how we want to make a change within our university and community.