I was in a fraternity as a freshman at Ohio State. Didn’t really love it or hate it. I transferred to a new school for my sophomore year because OSU was too big and I wasn’t doing well academically. The new school was so small it had no frats, and I didn’t miss frat life at all. I made closer friends in the dorm than I did in the frat house where I’d lived the year before.
Fraternities are great for some people, and pretty useless for others.
@IAMaconcerned I’m sorry to hear about your son’s rush experience. As a parent it must be difficult to go through this with him. Unfortunately the fraternity rush process is deeply flawed. As a member of a fraternity on my campus, former recruitment chair, and a part of the Interfraternity Council Executive Board I’ve witnessed first hand how rush can be both a great and horrible experience. One thing is in nearly all campuses he can rerush as a sophomore. Many guys rushing are nervous their first time around and may get rejected from one house only to be offered a bid that next year. I remember walking into the house I am now a part of as a new freshman and getting completely overwhelmed at seeing over 100 brothers at the house. Here are some tips I give people rushing when they ask IFC. Note my campuses Fraternity Rush is formal in the sense that it has a similar format to PanHellenic Social Sorority Recruitment. Maybe your son would fine them useful if he decides to do it again.
Hope this helps, again there’s a lot of things I wish were different in rushing but your son will be able to find his fit both in and outside of the greek system. There’s a whole world out there to explore and this won’t be the end of anything. Feel free to PM me if you have any questions.
@10s4life : “or say things like “you should check out other houses” then this is a sign”
Dear 10s4life,
This information is so helpful! Thank you for taking the time to write this and provide this feedback. My son is still crushed but planning to rush again in the Fall. At his school Freshman can only rush in the Spring- so I imagine the fall rush will be smaller? Do you have any advice on that? Also- most of his friends got BIDS in the fraternities that he wants- so I encouraged him to use them to make introductions and get to meet the guys. I told him to spend time at each house getting to know the guys on a 1:1 basis and less formally- but he thinks that will “annoy” the brothers because they don’t like non-brothers hanging out at the house. Any advice about how he can navigate this next semester and get ready for the Fall rush? Can’t express enough how much I appreciate your response.
Work his friends who got bids. Get invites to rush events and have the friend make the introductions. Then work from there.
@IAMaconcerned Of course! If spring is the big freshman rush then yes that’s the busier one and fall should be more low key. A smaller rush means generally more houses than guys rushing. It means the houses are competing for the guys rather than guys competing for the houses if that makes sense. Best advice is to be confident and to be himself. Impressions are everything in rush. Definitely have him keep in touch with friends. Most guys in our winter (your sons version of fall) class know guys in the previous class. And their recs and opinions both good and bad are heavily taken into account for bidding. I wouldn’t push too hard but make sure your son hangs with them even though they may be busy with pledging. It’s good anyways to have friends outside of the house. In terms of “annoying” brothers in general I don’t think it will. Brothers bring friends from other chapters all the time and it’s usually not a huge issue. Key point is the more guys your son knows the better his odds. If his friends are all in the same house and they are all similar it should help him in getting in for fall. As a side note there have definitely been people who we didn’t bid first time around then someone in the house became friends with them and they got a bid next time around. So don’t lose hope!
So they shouldn’t have sororities because some small percentage of girls don’t get any invitations? By that reasoning, we shouldn’t have college applications because not everyone can get in, and shouldn’t have try outs for plays and sports teams because not everyone can have a role or be the quarterback? What about the girls that are rejecting certain houses as not being popular?
I was in a house that was small and not popular. We invited everyone back and really almost anyone could join (a few rules about gpa’s, arrests, drug use). Now that same chapter is #1 on campus so they can’t ask everyone back.
How the formula works is that the bigger, more popular houses are limited early in the process as to how many they can invite so that the PNM are ‘pushed’ to the other houses and not left without invitations at the last minute. There is nothing the formula can do about girls who only want to join one particular house so turn down all the ‘unpopular’ houses (and they are only unpopular in the minds of the PNM). No different than applicants who only want to go to an Ivy and do not even look at other schools. Ivy or bust! and sometimes it is bust.
If sororities and fraternities are so evil, why do so many people want to join? Why are dozens of students suing Harvard for the right to join whatever groups they want to, to associate with people they choose to? Why are houses being added to college campuses to make places or all the students who want a Greek experience?
Fraternities have their own way of adding new members. Sorry that OP’s son was disappointed and I’d encourage him to keep trying but to maybe be open to more houses the next round.
The whole idea behind Greek life is exclusion…otherwise, why have a Rush process at all…I’ve felt strongly about this as it takes kids at the moment they should be reaching out to the larger world and pulls them back into a small world of people just like them. I had a conversation with one sorority girl who told me that “all kinds of girls are sisters here. We even had a girl who became a dentist!”
My son agrees with 10s4life. He said their chapter only initiates guys that are friends of other members that they get to know during the fall. (His is opposite big class in fall small in spring). Before he joined they got to know him and he was invited to everything they did all fall. They have nonfrat friends over all the time! They don’t mind others hanging out just don’t eat their food! They have a great cook and protect their food!
You think it is exclusion, but I think it is inclusion. "Come join us!’ I had many sisters who weren’t anything like me. We had a large number of engineers and I never would have met them at my school if we weren’t in the same sorority as I had nothing to do with the engineering school. Engineers, doctors, teachers, dancers, music majors all in one group. It also helped me accept others, to give people more than one chance to become a friend. There were a lot of people in my house who I wasn’t friends with, really had little in common with as far as music, religion, race, ethnic background. I wouldn’t think to ask them to a concert or to go skiing, but if they heard I was going they might go too. Honestly, if I’d met them once at a party in the dorms or in a class, I’d never have really interacted with them.
I read so often on CC that a student is really trying to make friends in the dorm and can’t even find someone to go have coffee with among classmates or dormmates. That’s never a problem in a sorority, especially if there is a house. There is always someone to go get an ice cream or go to the gym. It may not be a BFF, but it is someone to be with.
Really, that’s the whole idea?
It’s never a problem in a sorority because you exclude those young women from joining it.
But not always. As I said above, my house accepted everyone. Really. In the years I was there I think there were 4 people who didn’t receive an invitation to the second set of parties and those were for specific reasons. Two I remember behaved very inappropriately at the first event, like going into rooms they were asked not to (all at a 30 minute party) and were extremely rude. I don’t think they had any intention to join a house, just wanted to cause trouble. Four kids in 3 years, so out of over 3000 girls participating in Rush, only 4 were not invited back. We were rejected by many many many more.
In all honesty, I still do not entirely understand the Greek Life culture. Of course, I did not grow up in the USA, and when I got to the age that kids here decide whether to join or not, I was drafted. After three years in the military, the idea of voluntarily taking on a set of arbitrary rules and symbols for the sake of belonging to a group had, and still has, little appeal for me. Not that it was an issue, since Israeli universities do not have anything like the Greek system. The first time I interacted with kids from the frats and sororities was when I was their TA in grad school. I can’t say that they made much of an impression one way or another as students.
An amusing aside, is that when I was in grad school, one of my undergraduate field assistants was a young Greek American woman (there’s a large community in Chicagoland), who kept on getting asked whether she was Greek, and she would, of course, say that she was. People were always confused when, after they asked her “what sorority”, she would tell them that she didn’t belong to a sorority. “But I though you said that you were Greek?”, and so forth.
@“Cardinal Fang” I don’t see it as exclusionary at all. Yes the process of judging people on getting in is flawed but in the end its the same as not getting into a certain club or someone not wanting to be friends with you. Why let someone into your organization that doesn’t fit in. Its bad for both the overall group and that person. Greek life definitely isn’t for everyone and thats alright.
@SouthernHope Rather than exclusion I think its more about fit, it would be not very fun if everyone didn’t like to do the same type of stuff yet spent a lot of time together. That isn’t to say houses are segregated. Many people have friends and hang out with those from other houses.
@MWolf its for sure an American thing. There have been english students that have joined my house that had no idea what the greek system was before coming here.
No. Like social organizations in general, they range from exclusive to those that have a hard time attracting pledges and desperately recruit. Too many people get their impression of sororities and fraternities from movies that characterize them as either cliquish groups of mean girls, surfer dudes, or animal houses.
Fraternities & sororities differ in personality as do individuals.
I don’t understand the need for frats & sororities at small LACs. Seems like they would just make a small school smaller.
As someone who was not Greek, I imagine that the reason is to encourage people to seek out like-minded folks rather than choosing a house based on perceived popularity. There were definitely some subtle differences in the fraternities and sororities at my large southern school. Honestly, I wish I had pledged. It seems like it would have made a large school seem smaller and more friendly.
I’m not sure how fraternities work on every campus, but sororities here have a thing called “continuous open bidding” wherein those girls who didn’t get an initial bid can still be considered by houses that didn’t fill their quota.
Oh, and I just want to add, that my dorm was waaaaaaaaaay more cliquey and exclusionary than any sorority.
There is no sweeping generalization that anyone can make about fraternities or sororities that is ever close to being accurate. There are simply too many variables. I think people’s perceptions of greek life are kind of a Rorschach test based upon their own psychological constructs and aren’t really helpful.
OP, I’m so sorry your son experienced this pain but please believe that it’s temporary and that he will find his happiness either in or out of the greek system.
HI 10s4life,
Thanks again for your response- this makes me feel better! I do have one more question for you that I am trying to understand. When I told him to “keep his options open” and rush multiple fraternities he told me that he got invited back to a few events from different fraternities on the same night- so he had to choose which event to attend which seemed to tell the other frats that he was not interested. Then the one he chose to attend dropped him and he didn’t get a BID from the other ones either. How do you manage that?