| MathMom |
10-03-2016 01:27 PM |
Second Chance Recruitment
I’ve lurked around this board since late in my daughter’s junior year of high school (she’s now a college sophomore). I wasn’t Greek in college but by the time the kids were born, I’d married and moved to a part of the world where sororities and fraternities are huge and affiliations continue long after graduation. She grew up surrounded by sorority women, including my closest friends and the mothers/aunts/grandmothers/older sisters of her friends. She knew from a pretty early age that Greek life was something she wanted the opportunity to experience.
We moved to the Midwest right before junior high started and she went from a small private school with slightly over 200 kids K-12 to a huge public school system with close to 800 kids in her graduating class. She volunteered in the high school offices and when she was looking at colleges, one thing she said was, “we have kids come in the office for passes and when they tell me they’re in my grade, I look again and realize I’ve never seen this person before.” She’d experienced both educational environments and wanted a small college. She also played a club and high school team sport and by her graduation she knew wasn’t at a D1 level but she’d been approached by D2 & D3 schools and ultimately chose a D3 school that she fell in love with on a recruiting trip.
She went through recruitment and two things stuck out. She went to school out of state and realized when she got there how many girls either knew each other or knew of each other through the usual channels (high schools, camps, sports, etc.) She hadn’t counted on how many pre-existing relationships there would be (neither had I and on both our parts that was foolish). We were both well aware how much personal relationships help in recruitment but for some reason hadn’t realized how many there would be at a small school. The second was how much of an overall chapter identity there is in smaller chapters. At large schools, with chapters of 150+ girls, there are all kinds of people in every chapter. That is very likely true of many smaller chapters as well but her experience at a smaller school was that each chapter had its own feel. She went through formal recruitment but dropped out after pref. She said the girls in the chapter she preffed were individually very nice but together they seemed more resigned to being in their chapter than excited about it. She went to several of their COB events as well, hoping that maybe in a less formal setting she would see a different side of them, but it didn’t change. She received a COB bid but declined it. She and I talked for a long while about the bid and she was well aware that, at her school, Greek membership is almost a necessity for a positive social experience and she was well aware that declining the bid meant that she was in for a rough year. She made her decisions with no illusions about the consequences.
She was right; it was a very long year. In addition to the sorority situation, the coach who had recruited her to school left right before recruitment began. The AD made it very clear that replacing him wasn’t going to be a high priority of the athletic department. While she continued with her sport and finished out the season well, she knew there would not be a team the following year. The school had a few club team coaches volunteer time when they could during the season but it’s almost impossible to progress at a sport without dedicated coaching and she’d missed a year of that. She knew her days of competing in her sport were over. Her school wouldn’t have a team the next year and her skills hadn’t progressed enough to transfer somewhere else and play.
During her first semester, the coaching debacle and the Greek situation combined to make her seriously consider transferring back home. She did her research on her major, costs, living options and grad school acceptances and narrowed it down to 3 schools. She applied to all 3 but had a clear favorite (full disclosure-she’s dated the same guy since high school, they’re still together, and he is a student there) and when she got accepted, she was over the moon. She wanted to try recruitment again, even though she was aware that as a sophomore with less stellar grades than she’d had in high school (not a grade risk by any means but the first semester took a toll on her GPA), she would be starting the process behind the 8-ball. She also knew these were huge chapters (not SEC-level huge but most have well over 150 girls) and figured that with that many people, she could find a place and people with whom she fit.
At her transfer school, recruitment starts after classes are already in session. She went in again with an open mind, and while there was one chapter in which she absolutely could not picture herself, that was for religious regions. The organization is secular and accepts non-Jewish women but on this campus, it is strongly culturally Jewish and we aren’t Jewish. She went to all parties she was invited to there and was polite and considerate to the sisters but said it wasn’t a good fit for her.
She had very good first and second rounds but was cut hard after seconds. She is (for a 19 year old drama queen :)) a pretty pragmatic kid and the cuts were anticipated. She knew that even with an upperclass quota, there are chapters where there is a stigma to pledging sophomores. She had recs but this isn’t a rec-heavy school and while her GPA didn’t place her in the grade risk category, that first semester of freshman year had hurt her cumulative GPA. She was grateful to still be in the process and even with the cuts, she still had her number 1 since the Greek preview events and one that had been in her top 5 and steadily creeping up. By the time prefs came, she still had both and said they were so close that they weren’t even 1 & 2.They were 1 and 1a.
She went to prefs, filled out her bid card, and is now an ecstatically happy member of...
Alpha Gamma Delta
She’s a pearls, squirrels, and Alpha Gam girl!!
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