This Fall I gave up my letters and disaffiliated myself from my sorority to become one of Cal Poly’s Panhellenic recruitment counselors. As a recruitment counselor, or “RC” for short, our duty was to help the 1,000+ potential new members of Cal Poly’s Panhellenic sororities find the right home.
This meant that we had to hide the identity of our own house from the potential new members so that they wouldn’t become attached or detached from a certain house based on their relationship with us. We left our own sororities for three weeks and cut off extensive contact with friends, house family and roommates so that our house would remain a secret and they would get the best possible unbiased opinion of Greek Life at Cal Poly.
There are over 100 recruitment counselors involved in facilitating the recruitment process. The RC’s are organized into “color groups” where we learn how to manage our girls together as a team. I was put in the “purple” color group and I only knew one other girl in the purple group before the training and Fall recruitment began.
In each color group there was at least one woman from each sorority. Since the color groups were so diverse, I got to meet women from every single house. When someone else’s girl from any other group was upset, it didn’t matter who their RC was or what house they were associated with. No one knew or cared. What mattered most was getting this process done together and helping each other as a team. Never could I have guessed what house they were in while they were disaffiliated, if they did not tell me themselves.
This experience showed me that you can never judge a house based on a certain reputation they might have, or if you only know one person in the house, because there are girls of every personality and interest in every single organization. The stereotypes that are sometimes associated with certain organizations don’t hold up after all.
The same goes for the girls who I was mentoring in my “Purple #5” group. These girls looked up to me and it was an incredibly gratifying experience to be a role model to them. Most of my girls were new to being college students, with the exception of one transfer student and one girl who was a second year at Poly. All of these girls had their own personalities and interests and they were all amazing young women regardless of where they would end up accepting a bid from.
In the end, it didn’t matter at all what house I was in or what house any other recruitment counselor was in. We were all one big group of leading young women doing our best to make the best experience and best future possible for the 1000+ potential new members of Cal Poly Greek life, who we had grown to care about so much during the week of recruitment.