New Student Orientation and Fall Recruitment
 

I am a student at a small private college that recruits in the spring. We are fighting for recruitment in the fall and one of the major concerns our school has is how we can do new student orientation and recruitment at the same time. For those of you who go to small schools (less than 4000 students), how does your recruitment and new student orientation work together? Also, what school do you attend? Thanks!

My alma mater, which has around 3,000 undergrads, has orientation in the end of August (classes start the last week of the month), and recruitment a few weeks into September. This allows the women a few weeks to get used to their surroundings and classes, comes before mid-terms, and allows some time to get women excited about Greek Life without letting stereotypes and gossip to take root. Recruitment is held in the evenings (after most classes are out), and one weekend. It seems to work well, and there are few better alternatives.

Because we don't do recruitment until Winter Quarter (we run on trimesters...why they call them quarters, I'll never know), orientation does not interact w/ greek life stuff. However, there's usually a "Greek Q&A" session and there's always a Greek Life table at the First Friday festival.

I attended school with about 2100 undergrads that also had deferred formal recruitment in the spring for freshman. However, we also had a designated informal recruitment period in the fall for upperclassmen that freshman were welcome to attend to learn more about the chapters etc, but could not receive bids. This takes place around the third week of school (after the craziness of orientation & classes starting, but before the first round of exams). Most events are held in the early evening or on the weekend so as not to interfere with classes, but all the chapters are aware of potential conflicts because it does take place during classes and are usually very understanding if a PNM can't make an event. Depending on the size of your Greek system, I'd imagine this model could probably be modified fairly easily for formal recruitment too as there isn't a huge difference in the number or type of events that we would conduct each semester (fall vs spring).

Hope this helps!

Okay, so University of Wisconsin - River Falls is slightly bigger than 4,000, but not by much. Our new student orientation (WOW - Weeks of Welcome) begins the day the student moves in, and ends two days later. Recruitment Week begins the first full week of school, which ends up being the week after, and about 4 days after WOW is finished.