<p>Hi all,
I'm an incoming student for the Class of 2018 at Penn. While I am quite new to the whole Greek scene, I my cousin strongly recommended that I join and so I'm also very interested in rushing and possibly pledging to a sorority. I know Penn starts rushing after the winter break, and was just wondering if anyone knew about time management between the greek scene and academics. Personally, I'm very into research and could see myself spending 20~ hours at the lab per week. Would these interests conflict? Anyone with some experience or knowledge?</p>
<p>@yukihime29 - They shouldn’t conflict. College life for the very serious student is all about time management. At a school like Penn with lots of very smart and serious students, the sorority taking too much of your time should be even less of an issue. At most schools, Greek members have higher GPA’s than non-Greeks, from what I understand. Also, for most students, the busier you are the better your time management has to be, and so the better you do. My best semesters (I wasn’t Greek, btw) were when I was in 3 music groups, one of which actually traveled throughout the south, was doing research like you are mentioning (got 3 papers in the top Amer. Chem. Soc. journal), was dating regularly and was taking 18 hours. I had zero time outside of that so I was studying every second that came free, like when the other musicians were working on their parts and when something in the lab was “cooking”.</p>
<p>I am not saying you have to get that crazy busy, and it wasn’t like that for me every semester by any means. Just demonstrating that you can fit a lot into your life at college and still get superb grades and do the research, etc. You’ll know when you have hit your limit, if you do, and then you just have to prioritize. But having known lots of people that went Greek, I never got the impression from them nor did I observe that it sapped their time in an unreasonable way. </p>
<p>A good number of kids in my fraternity are pre-med and are doing just fine GPA-wise, and they did fine during pledging. Feel free to PM me if you want more information.</p>
<p>Yeah you’ll be fine. Joining a sorority will literally take nothing from your life if you don’t want it to. You spend as much time as you want with it (and get out of it how much you put in, of course). It’s with fraternities that you have to make sure you can handle it.</p>