Imagine walking into a room filled with over a hundred college women smiling from ear to ear, wearing their Greek letters, and already sharing a bond that you cannot even imagine being a part of. Sound intimidating? You’re right – it is. Last week along with 300 of my fellow tufts collegiettes I spent four days being judged, ranking sororities, and getting to know girls that I might have never met otherwise.
When I decided to attend Tufts in the spring of my senior year I never imagined myself being a sorority girl. Stereotypically I thought of Tufts as an intellectual community that would scoff at the idea of spending energy on something I used to think as so trivial. After my first semester at Tufts I realized that this was not the case, and that while not all students are involved in Greek Life, it definitely has a prominent place on campus. The girls in sororities who I met were not what I imagined them to be at all and were instead very smart and involved people who I felt like I could really connect with.
When deciding whether or not to go Greek my only hesitation was the judgment that I thought could come from students who were not at all interested in Greek life. I could not believe that on such a welcoming campus there were such legitimate stigmas against the Greek community. After getting the same negative attitude from my parents, both of whom graduated from small liberal arts colleges, I was discouraged, to say the least.
However, I still decided to go through with recruitment. After the first night of talking to girls in what felt like round after round of speed dating, I was exhausted and slightly put off by the process. There was no way I would be able to chose the girls I wanted to call my “sisters” in just three nights, and it was beyond me how they even began sorting through the 300 soon-to-be pledges. The rest of the nights passed by quickly and on “preference night” I found myself sitting in a room with roughly the same girls who I had started the process with.
As I watched those girls shed tears, call their moms, and hug their best friends I realized that, surprisingly, I was not torn. It was not that I hadn’t had a great experience in each of the four sororities, because I certainly had, it was simply that the recruitment process had subconsciously geared me towards my new home. Not only that, but it was about to open doors I hadn’t even know existed. As a proud new member of Alpha Phi my hesitations about the Greek system are diminishing day by day and, although I may still mock those who shout out “my seeesters!” at any given social event, in the end I could not be happier to have them by my side.
Edited by Adriana Guardans-Godo