<p>The only important thing I’m going to say is that one doesn’t need to join Greek Life to have an enjoyable college experience. For some people Greek Life helps to enhance that experience, and then there are others unfortunate enough to never even get access to to any fraternity/sorority; but people really should not try to let that get to them too much (I hope). When you’re dealing with human beings, you’re bound to be rejected by someone. A part of interacting with people in college is knowing whom to befriend and whom to disregard.</p>
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I’m not asking you to explain brotherhood. I’m asking to you to explain why your version of brotherhood is better than mine. If you can’t give me a single reason, then shut up about ‘fraternal bonds’.</p>
<p>Well I’m not quite sure what you want me to compare it to considering you’ve never explained your “brotherhood”.</p>
<p>My brotherhood is simply having friends. What do you have that I don’t in terms of this relationship?</p>
<p>My brothers, and especially my pledge brothers, are not just “friends”. I’ve been through a lot more with them than you ever have with your friends. That I can guarantee and before you even say “You don’t know me so how would you know?!?!?!”, I can say that I have plenty of regular “friends” too and there’s no way that the same brotherhood could be established outside of the fraternity culture. I’m gonna take immense amounts of sh it for this and frankly I don’t care. I’ll say it once more, the brotherhood is not something I can explain to you and I don’t expect you to get it, but it’s not just a pro, it’s the biggest pro of fraternity life.</p>
<p>EDIT: Harry just flipped through your post history for a second, kinda embarrassing that all of your posts are either in high school life or ripping on fraternities.</p>
<p>“I’ve been through a lot more with them than you ever have with your friends.”</p>
<p>Maize, that’s what I meant when I called your post arrogant. You act like your friendships are so above the ones made outside of fraternities/sororities and that Greek life is the be all end all when it comes to establishing lasting relationships. I’m sure you have made strong connections with those in your fraternity, but don’t go around acting like your friendships are better than those outside of Greek life. </p>
<p>Of course there are benefits to sororities/fraternities, but there is plenty to be found outside of them as well. Everyone is different and what’s meaningful is subjective.</p>
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+1</p>
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This suggests that you’re really bad at making friends.</p>
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I laughed here. Yay for hazing!</p>
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No, I get along great with almost everyone in person, it’s just a different dynamic than with your fraternity brothers. Someone not in greek life trying to argue against this doesn’t really hold merit considering they’ve never experienced this.</p>
<p>And, for the last time, responding to blatant disrespect to greek life with examples of the main benefits of being in a fraternity is not arrogance.</p>
<p>Former fraternity president and former vice president of my school’s greek student body. Both of my parents are former national presidents of their respective greek organizations as well.</p>
<p>Pros (this is assuming you have joined a well run house and you put in the effort to get the most out of it):
- At a large school, having a smaller community to identify with can help make the experience more enjoyable
- Increasing your social network. I mean this both professionally, personally, and academically.
- Easy access to leadership and responsibility roles and, if the house is well run, leadership training.
- Teaches you how to interact with people in a way that other organizations don’t. No other organization on campus is one that’s meeting 24/7. Every moment of every day you are part of your fraternity, and you represent you, your brothers, and your house. This is whether you’re with your friends who are indies, in class, at work, with your brothers, at some other extracurricular, etc. No other organization is quite as consuming as greek life can be.
- Access to more resources: whether it’s man hours, things the house owns, the house itself, knowledge from older students, etc. This is kind of an add on to 2, if you have close bonds with more people, you have access to greater support in every way imaginable.
- More fun. When my indie friends threw parties, they were jokes. That stuff is expensive on your own or in a small group. When we threw a party, it was big, and it was awesome. I never had to organize an IM team, there was always one for every sport, I didn’t have to plan my weekends, that’s what the social chairs were for. Even if an indie has as many friends as a greek, it’s a guarantee they don’t live with them the way a greek does. Having all those guys in the house just makes it that much easier to have fun at any moment. Not living in a frat house has been the hardest thing to adjust to about graduating.</p>
<p>Cons (some apply to any house, some only apply to bad houses):
- Hazing (bad houses only): This is unfortunately a minority opinion (although it’s growing a lot) but hazing is completely unnecessary. If you think it’s an important part of brotherhood, you’re doing it wrong.
- Time sink: pledging is a lot of time, and being active in the house is a lot of time
Conflict can spring up easily: yes, living in the house is awesome, but it can obviously lead to conflict if people don’t get along and you see them all the time. If you’re house is any good, you’ll learn how to resolve conflicts as mature adults. - Isolating: depending on your personality, being in a fraternity provides you with a nice safety net that can disincentivize you from branching out beyond the greek social circle. (or if you’re in a bad house, they will promote such behavior)</p>
<p>What separates brotherhood from friendship is that it goes beyond it. It is far from a social relationship. You operate within an organization working on goals and projects that are bigger than any one of you or even your group of friends. It’s a 24/7 experience through living, working, and partying together all the time that immerses you in a way that most friendships don’t. The one thing I do agree with HarryJones on is to claim that only greeks are capable of this bond or these experiences is arrogant. But it certainly is much,much easier to get there and much, much more likely to happen as a greek than as an indie. But I will also say that this takes work. Just slapping three greek letters on your chest doesn’t make all of this happen. It takes effort from every single member every single day to truly get the most out of the experience. There are plenty of people in my chapter whom I haven’t spoken to since graduation because they didn’t do that, and I certainly won’t sit here and claim that I have a bond with them worth bragging about.</p>
<p>But I will say that my father, more than 50 years out of his undergrad days still speaks with every one of his (still living) pledge brothers, none of whom live close to him, on a regular basis. I grew up referring to many of them as Uncle this or Uncle that, and it took me a long time to comprehend that they weren’t <em>actually</em> related to me, especially since many of them were more involved in my life than many of our actual relatives.</p>
<p>It’s just like grad school or jobs or whatever. There are opportunities you can get that will greatly increase your chances of the things you want. If you want what I was talking about in the pros section, I will never say you can’t get it without going greek, but, as hard as it is to get there as a greek, it’s exponentially easier than trying to get there as an indie.</p>
<p>Post above pretty much sums it up.</p>
<p>Yeah, you can form very strong friendships, except it’s much harder. As part of a Greek organization, I quickly gained ~30 brothers. At the same time, spending about 1/3 the time with friends outside my chapter, I only managed to get one friend outside my chapter that I’d consider just as close. In a fraternity, each person brings in one or two people, and since everyone already has similar values, you get several more bonds quicker due to all the leverage by your brothers. It also helps that there are established rules/practices on what to do / not to do to make the process as efficient as possible.</p>
<p>After four years of college, I ended up with ~20 lifelong friends thru my fraternity (tbh, I bonded well with most, but not necessarily all, of my brothers), 5 thru serving on Interfraternity Council, and 2 more outside of Greek Life.</p>
<p>I also learned a lot of leadership skills in my fraternity as we experienced failures that would usually kill off most organizations / businesses. However, the brotherhood allowed for a level of resilience to work through those mistakes to correct them and avoid them elsewhere.</p>
<p>That’s my summation of it. Explaining Greek Life to outsiders is like explaining the importance of college to working-class parents who see it as a way to remove four years of income from a young person. There’s a gap of understanding that must be crossed.</p>
<p>I am a founding member of a co-ed fraternity that is very new to my campus- so my experiences are a little different than single sex, established fraternities and sororities.</p>
<p>Pros:
Ability to meet new people you would otherwise not have met
Brotherhood (I’ll talk a bit more on this below)
Promotion of values/philanthropy/goals that you agree with</p>
<p>Cons:
Financial/time commitment (although the financial one, to me at least is the lesser one since I know where my dues go and what they are used for- we vote on the budget and how we allocate funds)
Some issues with group function (it can be difficult to get things done as a larger group)</p>
<p>I did not come to college with the intention of joining Greek life. However, that had more to do with the lack of organizations that interested me, and the lack of interest I had in most of the people who were joining the one org I might have joined that with general dislike of the system.</p>
<p>I saw an email about joining the founding class and I looked up the org. I liked what I saw and went to go meet the other interested people. I loved all of them. They were the sorts of people who I would have befriended anyway if had ever met them before. I am so grateful to my org for bringing together such an awesome group of people who are committed to promoting the same values that I have.</p>
<p>With regard to the brotherhood/siblinghood/sisterhood aspect, I feel that it is a slightly different relationship compared to a regular friendship. It is friendship that is enhanced by a common goal, organization and experience, and last but not least commitment to something greater than individual bonds. All of your siblings chose to join this organization because they believe in the goals of the organization (I chose to be a founding member because I wholeheartedly support my org’s message); they share this bond because they are members too- they went through the same process, the same rituals, and had a wonderful time doing it- if they didn’t enjoy it, I hope they would have dropped; and lastly, brotherhood is different than normal friendship because all of the people I call brother/sister because they want to help me and have me help them make our org better than it is now. The constant push to improve the experience, to fulfill our goals for the org, to ensure that we spread our message on campus together makes our bond very different from a regular friendship. We share a lot of things together and work to push a united message that we all believe in. </p>
<p>To me, that’s different that my regular close friendships. With them, I share experiences, but nothing as unifying as I do with my brothers. I’m very close to my friends, but except for one, I couldn’t call any of them my brothers because for that sort of friendship (without that unifying function of my org) the difference between sibling friend and close friend is a matter of time and background. Only of my friends (my best friend since fourth grade) really matches that. My brothers are my brothers because of the goals we work toward as we forge our bonds.</p>
<p>^ to caemin</p>
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</p>
<p>Men and women cannot be just friends because the sex part always gets in the way.</p>
<p>“Men and women cannot be just friends because the sex part always gets in the way.”</p>
<p>…Not sure why you would think that. As a woman, I have a lot of close guy friends. Who are just friends. Period. </p>
<p>And I’m not sure how that’s relevant to my post, unless you’re claiming that there cannot be a co-ed fraternity with “just friends” because men and women are inherently sex-obsessed and that affects their ability to bond over common goals.</p>
<p>^ A guy can’t be friends with a girl unless she’s ugly or fat.</p>
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Um, no. Just no.</p>
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</p>
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</p>
<p>[Why</a> Men and Women Cant be friends - YouTube](<a href=“http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_lh5fR4DMA]Why”>http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T_lh5fR4DMA)</p>
<p>Now what do I trust more - an internet video, or my own life experiences. Hmm, this is a toughie…</p>
<p>I’m in a sorority at a large public midwest school with a very competitive recruitment. I wouldn’t trade my Greek life experiences for the world</p>
<p>Pros:
-live in a house with 90 of your best friends
-you make the best memories (sometimes watching YouTube videos at 3 am really is worth it)
-you almost always have a sister in the house who has taken a class you’re in, rarely do you not find someone who’s had Professor XY and can tell you what the class is like
-networking opportunities
-fundraising and helping out with your chapter’s philanthropy–I’ve become involved with a charity I wouldn’t have been as interested in before
-makes a large university smaller
-always have someone to come home to and celebrate or cry with, irregardless of what happened
-fashion/boy/school advice is just a door or 3 away
-cheaper than living in the dorms and much nicer, at least at my school
-teaches you conversational skills and how to work as a team to achieve a common goal
-CRAFTING SKILLS (I’m kidding…but really. I can craft with the best of them now)</p>
<p>Cons:
-financially can be pricey, but its comparable to living in an apartment with housing corp fees, dues, and room/board
-with that many girls in one area, drama can be prevalent, but it always passes
-you can be judged by independents because people think you’re ‘flighty,’ ‘a ditz,’ ‘slutty,’ ‘always drunk,’ or a member of the fat/whore/party/athletic/whatever chapter
-greek/independent rivalry can be intense at times
-can be a timesink with philanthropy, recruitment, initiation, chapter, etc.</p>
<p>Honestly, even though at times we all were frustrated, there’s nothing about my Greek life experience that I would have changed. The bonds I have with my sisters are nothing like the ones I have with my independent friends, and I find that the girls I’ve met through my sorority are much more loyal and true than those I met early in my collegiate experience. My sisters helped celebrate my admittance to graduate school and securing a highly competitive internship, and brought me ice cream when I went through a tough breakup. I can’t count the number of times I did the same things for my sisters. I also can’t speak for the number of friends I have from other chapters (fraternity and sorority) that will go on to do great things. It really made my collegiate experience what it was</p>
<p>[Examining</a> the benefits of Greek Life | USA TODAY College](<a href=“USA Today Educate - Teacher & Student Resources & Guides”>USA Today Educate - Teacher & Student Resources & Guides)</p>
<p><a href=“Office of Student Involvement | Student Involvement | University of Missouri - Kansas City”>Office of Student Involvement | Student Involvement | University of Missouri - Kansas City;
<p>i’d be careful of greek life, their economy is in the toilet</p>