Legally Blonde, Sydney White and The House Bunny. What do all these movies have in common? They’re all about the Greek system, and in particular sororities. The Greek system is a set of groups which men or women join in order to make friends, volunteer, or do countless other things. However, in order to join a sorority (an organization of women) or a fraternity (an organization of men), you must go through a process of recruitment, commonly known as “rush”.
Recruitment involves different things for each organization, but it mainly starts with the chapter hosting recruitment “tabling” events where current members try to encourage people to rush their sorority and go through recruitment. After that, potential members will receive a recruitment calender for when rush events will occur. The number of events vary for each organization, but most are between 4 and 10 events. Most events center around the organization’s pillars, such as philanthropy, academics and socializing, in order to give potential new members a glimpse into greek life.
After the potential members have gone through the recruitment process, the organization will decide who they wish to invite to join their fraternity/sorority by offering them a “bid” to become a brother/sister. Again, each group does something different to give out these bids, but most ceremonies are filled with tradition and rituals. After that, the greek life is whatever you make of it.
Something that is different about the University of Ottawa’s recruitment than other universities with a Greek presence (especially in the US) is that we do informal recruitment, where you can rush whichever and however many sororities you want. However, at other universities you must rush all organizations and as time goes on the organization and yourself decide which you click the most with.
So whether you have dreamed of going Greek for a while or have never heard of fraternities and sororities, hopefully this article was informative and gave you an insight as to what Greek recruitment is!
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