Recently, I took part in formal recruitment at my university. Before I go into my experience with rush, I should probably tell you a little about myself. In high school, I did a lot of theater and never dreamed I would rush a sorority. Not that the two necessarily relate, but I would assume most of my friends in theater also didn’t ever see me rushing. The culture that I had seen on twitter and movies was not something I wanted to be apart of. I am deeply fearful of rejection, just as most humans are, and try to avoid situations in which that is a possibility at all costs. Rushing was just not something I thought I would do in college. I ended up going to a fairly small college, however, where sorority life is not an overwhelming beast of a machine and the culture is fairly healthy from what I could see from the outside. I decided, what the heck, let’s give it a go. I thought rush would be super short, lowkey surface-level conversations, and everyone that I liked would also like me and it would be sunshine and rainbows. I do not get emotional typically and I am normally pretty unaffected by most things. I went into the weekend thinking I would maybe be in a sorority by the end of it but life would go on if I was not. Turns out, even if you go to a small school, rush is an emotional rollercoaster.
The first day of rush consisted of quick rounds where you visited each sorority for about 20 minutes. You talked to about three girls in each sorority and then from those few conversations you had to drop two sororities and create a top 5. I thought it would be easy to get a feel for the sorority and that I would be able to set aside my preconceived notions of which was the “best” sisterhoods and just enjoy my conversations. While I did genuinely enjoy talking to the girls that day, I could not differentiate what I thought would be a good fit. It is important to look at the values of each sorority, however, all the sororities have similar values so that can be a dead end as well. On the flipside, I thought there is no way the girls I spoke to got any real read on who I am as a person. How you present yourself in a 5 minute conversation is entirely different to your true personality. I knew that sororities scout out potential new members before rush, but going through the process, I realized how much must go into their decisions on who they let into their sisterhood. Since my social media has not evolved since I was in middle school, which is something I was not going to change about myself just to fit in, I figured I was about to be dropped from a lot of sororities–which I was. The second day, you can go back to a maximum of 5 sororities. For some reason, I just assumed everyone was called back to five automatically. I was called back to four places, two of which I had ranked quite low and assumed I would be dropping by the second day. Even though I had a top three and only one of my top three dropped me, it still hurt. Sororities that I had absolutely no interest in joining dropped me and I thought, “why am I so hurt by this?” It is a somewhat mutual decision that I was not right for them and they were not right for me, but you still ask yourself, “why don’t they like me? What did I do wrong?”
The hard truth of the weekend was that each sisterhood cannot let in everyone and the politics that go into that decision was a tough pill to swallow. The second day was tough, not only for my personal woes, but more for seeing all the crying girls around me. Day two really made me rethink if this whole culture was for me. I don’t like groups that exclude and while my school tried to make rush as healthy of a process as possible, you cannot escape the fact that sororities are built upon inclusion of some and exclusion of others. Yet, it’s not like high school where these sort of dynamics exist but you can pretend they aren’t really there. Sororities hand it to you straight: you are accepted to hang with us, you are not accepted to hang with us.
Although that part of the process can be hard to handle, the mantra of the weekend definitely rings true: trust the process. I did end up finding my home through the heartbreak, a sorority that had been in my top the whole weekend and one that I feel I do belong in. Yet, I have to think of the girls who didn’t get into the group they wanted or dropped the process entirely. I just have to assume that the girls in the sororities were looking out for those girls and understood they would not have been happy in that society.
I am happy I rushed and found my home. I just want to warn those who are faint at heart and have low self-esteem to really reflect if this is the right process for them or to develop a plan if the weekend does not go their way. I saw too many girls get hurt this past weekend and I hope we continue to find healthy ways to rush sororities.
(Shoutout to Annie Crosson for article idea)