Sororities, SLGs, independent housing: welcome to the first few weeks of your second semester at Duke. Even though everyone warned you that it was going to get very chaotic, you had absolutely no idea that it could really get this chaotic.
Having just finished recruitment for Greek life as well as SLGs, I am now exhausted in every respect- not that it matters. I have events every night this week with different organizations, and I don’t even want to think about the pile of schoolwork I have to dive into some time before next week starts.
‘Rush’ is that awful term that makes everyone roll their eyes, whether it’s regarding frats, sororities, or SLGs, simply because of how tedious and time consuming it is. You have to spend lots of time and energy trying to connect with people in a setting that practically forces the conversation in a superficial direction. So why do we do it? If you were to tear apart the mechanisms that we use to get into one of these social groups, you’d find so many flaws in them that it’s incredibly surprising that they’re still around. Take sorority rush as a main example. Herds of freshmen have to get all dressed up to meet and greet sorority girls, trying to make some sort of impression, hoping they find comfort and acceptance in one of the many groups.
The second round of rush is eight hours long and our lunch options were pitiful. Girls with more outgoing personalities obviously have the upper hand, and so do girls who already have contacts in one of the chapters. If you were a newbie to the social scene, bad at making small talk, or not super sociable, you were done for. Even those who were dying to be in a sorority would openly talk about how much they hated rush, and yet, there we were, three-hundred and something girls on Bid Day, opening up our envelopes and hoping we had gotten lucky. Why?
I don’t think Greek life is necessary at all for university girls and guys to figure out who they like and who they want to be friends with. But, honestly, when your class consists of 1,750 people, some kind of speed-dating system helps. Isn’t that essentially what we’re all doing? It’s a toned down, group version of speed-dating for people who want to be matched up with friends. It’s awful, and tends to be superficial because of the forced set up–no one naturally becomes friends this way–but for the most part, it works. All these different conglomerates of social groups can be frustratingly annoying to get into, but at the end of the day, they provide a structure that we can choose what to do with. Friends exist across different frats and chapters and SLGs. Friends exist across independent housing. Just because you’re not affiliated doesn’t mean you’re isolated, and not everyone involved in Greek life is a terrible, superficial person.
If rush week got you down, remember that you’re at Duke, a place where everyone is involved in thousands of different things. Who you party with (or don’t party with) doesn’t really matter at the in the grand scheme of things, because people here generally tend to respect you for more than what section on campus you live in. It’s been an overwhelming start to the semester, and I can imagine that not everyone got out of these awful rush processes unscathed. But in a matter of time, once everyone settles in to their new groups, or settles into themselves, things will feel a little more normal for everyone.
Especially after we get our regular sleep patterns back. Maybe all we need is an organization for social napping.