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Recruitment Edition: Freshmen Blog — Open House

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Annie Rondone & Rachel Williamson Student Contributor, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
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Emily Cleary Student Contributor, University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Illinois chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

It’s official. We love recruitment. We love hearing every sorority’s songs and having them stuck in our heads forever. We love going into every house and seeing girls that love being there. We love “walking with a purpose!!!” We love when our Gamma Chis tell us how many houses we have left to visit and the majority of the women in my group groan but we get excited. We’re weird.
 
Visiting eighteen chapters seemed daunting at the beginning. We wondered how we would be able to survive! Let me tell you, it was not always smiles though (our faces hurt from smiling all the time – we can’t help it!). Finding your bag in a sea of like bags (especially in the dark) can get crazy. Having to write all we remembered from each chapter after we left was difficult. There were so many names, not to mention the fact that writing while walking is not one of our strong suits. Years from now when we look back at our recruitment booklets, we’re going to see our handwriting and cringe because it’s THAT bad.]

 
We’re still trying to keep an open mind through the entire process. We visited many chapters that we loved and could possibly see ourselves there. Although, talking with two or three people for about ten minutes, it’s hard to get a true feeling of the house. Some conversations we had, had their awkward, forced moments, but others we felt right at home with the women we were talking to.
 
Coming back to our suite after each night with Katie, our good friend who lives a few floors below us, all we wanted to do was talk about the houses we had visited. Our suitemates who are not going through recruitment kindly sat while we gushed about how beautiful each house was and while we sang some of the songs were stuck in our heads. Hopefully first invite will go well for both of us! Wish us luck!

Emily Cleary is a 22-year-old news-editorial journalism major hoping to work in the fashion industry, whether that be in editorial, marketing, PR or event planning is TBD. With internships at Teen Vogue and StyleChicago.com, it's clear that she is a fashion fanatic. When she's not studying (she's the former VP of her sorority, Delta Delta Delta), writing for various publications or attending meetings for clubs like Business Careers in Entertainment Club, Society of Professional Journalists, The Business of Fashion Club, or for her role as the Assistant Editor of the Arts & Entertainment section of her school's magazine, she's doing something else; you will never find her sitting still. She loves: running (you know those crazy cross-country runners...), attending concerts and music festivals, shopping (of course), hanging out with friends, visiting her family at home, traveling (she studied abroad in London when she was able to travel all over Europe), taking pictures, tweeting, reading stacks and stacks of magazines and newspapers while drinking a Starbuck's caramel light frappacino, blogs and the occasional blogging, eating anything chocolate and conjuring up her next big project. Living just 20 minutes outside of Chicago, she's excited to live there after graduation, but would love to spend some time in New York, LA, London or Paris (she speaks French)!