[aephi alum]

Great summary, Lisa!

Let me add a couple of things:

You can only receive one bid during formal recruitment. After pref, you rank the sororities whose pref parties you attended, and the sororities rank the PNMs who attended their prefs. The lists are compared, and hopefully you match and receive a bid from one of your three choices. (But there's always a possibility that you won't match even if you attended pref and turned in your ranking.)

During informal recruitment, you can visit more than one sorority and receive more than one bid. If you do receive more than one bid, you can only accept one.

Not every sorority will participate in informal. Any sorority that is at or over total (a "maximum" number of members) and met quota in the last formal recruitment (a "maximum" number of bids that each sorority may extend during FR) won't hold informal.

faugirl, take a look around the rush and recruitment stories forums for more details. There's a wealth of information.