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Old 07-28-2004, 05:16 PM
sugar and spice sugar and spice is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2002
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Re: Re: Why in the world should a lady be expected to join a house she didn't want to?

Quote:
Originally posted by navane

Now, several times I have seen an occassion where a PNM reported that she was left with chapters on her invite list which were not her 1st, 2nd, or 3rd choice. Some of these chapters were at the very bottom of the PNM's personal list. The PNM wanted so very much to be in a sorority, but she just did not want to be in that one on the bottom of her list or bid. Girls like this agonize or whether or not to quit.

I cringe when I read impassioned pleas from sorority women encouraging the PNM to not give up and to "give that chapter a chance" because, "you might end up loving it" or "that chapter must have seen something in you". Some people even go so far as to imply that a chapter will know better than the PNM as whether or not she'll fit in there, so they should just go with it. <shudder>
I don't mean to be overly confrontational because I agreed with much of your post, and I even agree with this passage -- to an extent. I think it's difficult for many people to understand NPC rush if they haven't been through it -- it's very much a "seeing things from the inside-out" experience -- and that is why so many of the men have issues with the way it's run.

The problem is that many of the times, a chapter DOES know better than a PNM where she belongs. I'm not going to hesitate to say that this is what happened with me. Like I said earlier in this thread, two years later I can look at some of the other houses I loved and realize that know that I probably would have depledged from all but one of them, had I joined. And I know I'm not the only person on GC who can say that. So at least a handful of us are speaking from experience.

Also -- quoting from memory from further down in your post -- I think the reason that many, many of us don't encourage girls to go through rush again is because, unless there's a specific reason that they can pinpoint as to why they were cut, and this can be changed (like raising a too-low GPA), they are probably not going to fare any better the next time around. A girl who gets cut from all but one house as a freshman will be even LESS likely to prosper in rush next year unless she makes changes, and most girls, understandably, don't. (Of course, this isn't universally true -- I met a really sweet sophomore last year during rush who said she'd rushed the year before and dropped out, and felt like, as an immature freshman, she'd put up an act during rush week and her invites had suffered because the sororities saw through it -- so this time around she was going to be her real self. I checked up on her after rush and she had gotten into a top house. But she's the exception and not the rule.) The majority of women who have been through rush on both sides can see this long before the PNMs can.

But what I think this whole thing comes down to is "Sometimes people don't get their top choices, so they have to decide whether to accept the best of what they got or to try again" -- and that's definitely not just an NPC issue. In any group where there's selective membership, it's going to be a problem.

The NIC has more freedom in the way it runs its rush process. The NPC trades autonomy for stability and I think most sorority women are fine with that. But given how often we get questioned about this by the guys, apparently most of them aren't fine with it.
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