<p>I've always been the type to turn my nose up at frat guys and sorority girls. I always have assumed they were just the unmotivated, party-loving kids from high school. </p>
<p>Is this true? Am I completely wrong? What even is greek life....</p>
<p>Yes you are completely wrong that that is what all fraternity and sorority people are. In fact, you will meet many people like that who don’t go greek.</p>
<p>What “greek life” is like is going to depend greatly on what school and what organization at that school.</p>
<p>I can share you my experience from my fraternity at Brown - which is not unique - but also not representative of every chapter everywhere.</p>
<p>Actually, your question is pretty broad and I’m not sure how to answer it. At Brown the greek orgs are housed in blocks of dorms on a particular quad, so my daily life involved coming home to a dorm with pretty much all my closest friends in the same building (definitely didn’t like everyone in the chapter - no one does). Life generally isn’t too much different from college life in general except you have this organization you’re a part of that is 24/7. There are meetings (weekly brothers meetings, e-board, rush committee, pledge committee, social committee), procedures, rules, activities to plan (intramurals, parties, pledge/rush events, brothers’ only events, formals), etc etc. We had a specific area at the cafeteria we always ate at so you didn’t have to round up people to go to a meal, you would just go there and people would be there. Given the nature of the organization, you learn a lot more social/management skills in a shorter period than other orgs since you’re never really away from the group and leaving the group is much more cumbersome than a normal friend group so you can’t just give up if things get bumpy.</p>
<p>With regard to academics I guess, I had an instant network of older students in my major for advice on selecting courses, studying, preparing for the MCAT (one of my brothers was a kaplan tutor and I ended up doing it too), the only person from Brown I knew as an UG who did MD/PhD before me was an older fraternity brother. I’ve got an awesome network of friends and alumni all over the country in various fields (lawyers, doctors, engineers, bankers, teachers, scientists, journalists, politics, etc). Some of that you get just from school, but it’s definitely enhanced by the shared traditions and experiences that other people from your school don’t have.</p>
<p>If you have more specific questions, I think my answers would be more helpful.</p>
<p>It is the case that fraternity and sorority membership is generally associated with more drinking and binge drinking.</p>
<p>However, there is considerable variation between colleges and chapters. There exist completely dry fraternity houses (usually required by the college or the national organization), which are likely quite different from the Animal House stereotype. Even in the days before insurance concerns started causing colleges and national organizations to force chapters to go dry, there was considerable variation between chapters at a given college.</p>
<p>Why would you turn your nose up at something which you admit you know nothing about?</p>
<p>It’s impossible to generalize because greek life is different at different campuses and in different parts of the country. In general, most national greek organizations will require a minimum gpa in order for acceptance and those gpa requirements can be even higher at colleges with competitive greek systems so you couldn’t be more wrong about them being havens for the unmotivated students. IME, the average gpas for sorority members always exceeds the average gpas for the college at a whole.</p>
<p>If you want to know about the greek experience at a particular school you should ask about that school rather than a general inquiry. You’ll get better answers.</p>