Whether going through sorority recruitment in the fall or spring, south or north, the process is likely the same:
Meet your group and leader.
Get your first schedule.
Wake up the next day.
Head to the first round of parties.
Believe it or not, many lessons are learned during sorority recruitment—Trust, rejection, acceptance, and friendship (to name a few). Recruitment season is stressful for all girls involved -- emotions run high with very little sleep to back them up. Ultimately though, everything works out the way it’s supposed to. This is the purpose of the method (Release Figure Methodology -- or RFM) used by every chapter to determine the quota for each new member class they can take. These rules protect the chapters and potential new members (PNMs) to ensure everyone has a place to run home to at the end of the week.
My sorority recruitment experience was a week I will never forget. Moving into my dorm a week earlier than everyone else to participate in recruitment was one of the happiest days of my life. I was moving to the city I would later call home again once I graduated. I was excited to get this process underway. My mom always told me about her sorority experience and how it changed her life; I wanted a similar experience. That first night, we all met up in the arena to meet our groups for the rest of the week, as well as our Rho Gammas (also known as Rho Chis at some schools -- these are current active members of various chapters who have volunteered to mentor the incoming girls). To this day, I still keep in touch with my Rho Gamma.
At the same time we met our groups, we received our first schedules. The number of chapters the school has depends on the schedule the PNMs will get. For me, we went to all the houses for round 1 in the first two days of the week. At the end of round 1, the PNMs made their first decisions. This is the first taste of Release Figure Methodology (RFM). When I returned to the Schollmaier Arena to make my selections, my expectations of the houses I would be asked back to were very high.
We arrived at the arena the following day and received our round 2 schedules. Optimistically, I opened my paper slip; my heart plummeted. My sheet said five out of the thirteen houses. I was crushed. This was my first experience with RFM at work. There can be many reasons a chapter does not select a girl after round 1: grades, conversation, and quota numbers are just a few. As the week goes on, the same procedure occurs after each round and the next morning until preference round.
The last party is the most important of all. This is the longest round in which you spend upwards of an hour at each house you attend. During my preference round, we could have a maximum of three houses to be invited back to; I had three. When I went to each house, I had a clear vision of which ones I could see myself in and which I could not.
That's when everything changed.
After all my preference rounds finished, I rushed to the union to fill out my MRABA (Membership Recruitment Acceptance Bidding Agreement), a binding contract that says if you get a bid from one of these places, you will accept it. I sat down to put my preferences down and knew what I wanted to do.
I wanted to break the rules.
They tell you when you sit down that the best way to get your first choice is to “maximize your options”. I did not do that. Out of my three houses left, I knew there was one I did not want to end up in at the end, so I did not rank them on my card. Honestly, it was a tough decision, but I knew that if I ended up in either of the other chapters, my sorority experience would be great.
I walked over to the next available station to input my selections and sat down. First, the advisor checks my sheet to ensure the correct information is written. When she saw that my third house was not on my written card, she raised her hand and the Director of Panhellenic came over to our station, as a precaution because I was not “maximizing my options”. This is the purpose of RFM. If a PNM decides to take a chapter off of their preference card, they are potentially jeopardizing their chances of receiving a bid at all.
Once your preferences are imputed into the computer, you're officially done with recruitment! Congratulations! Then the hard part came, waiting to see which chapter would become my legacy. For us, Bid Day came two days after the last round, so the waiting was strenuous. On the day before classes started, as we sat on our bid cards (yes, they made us sit on them until we were allowed to open them), anticipation and nerves ran high. That was it. The little envelope between me and the floor held the name of the chapter I would call home for the rest of my life. I opened my card and immediately screamed, I got my first choice!
The most significant advice I would give to anyone going through sorority recruitment is truly to trust the process. The RFM process is there for a reason; ultimately, it is secured that a PNM will get a bid from one of the houses on their bid card. No matter what, the key is to follow your heart and gut and trust the process. It's there for a reason.
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