Raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimized by Regina George.

Now seriously raise your hand if you have ever been personally victimized for joining a sorority. Every day, another judgement on sorority girls will be made; all they do is party, they don’t care about grades, they are way too friendly with boys, they buy their friends and they are fake or plastic. These stereotypes are thrown around every day by people that might even be friends with sorority girls. Why is it so easy to trash sororities? Why does no one ever talk about all the great things a sorority brings?

As a legacy, I knew for quite a while I would one day go to college, go through recruitment and pledge a sorority. I had practically grown up wanting to be a member of my mother’s sorority, and I never once thought of the negative image becoming a sorority girl could give you. Growing up, all I heard were stories of fun sisterhood events, cute theme night skits, a serious lack of skills during intramurals, big and little bonding and how her sisters were still friends this day. So, I pledged, and I finally got to wear my mother’s letters; I couldn’t have been happier. I was finally about to experience all the great things she had experienced years ago.

It’s been two years since I pledged that sorority, and I have since heard every rumor, laughed along to jokes about paying for my friends and tried to see why this was what everyone thought about us. Yes, we like to have a good time; we are twenty years old. Grades are very important to us. Boys still stink, and I pay for a sorority not my friends.

What I also found was that we care about people; sorority girls all over the country raises thousands of dollars for philanthropies of all types. We enjoy study parties at the local coffee house to help each other out with that next exam. We enjoy being goofy and dressing up in all kinds of costumes to spend all night long dancing and hanging out together. We protect each other no matter what hurts one of our sisters. When you need to call someone, there is always a sister on the other end of the phone ready to listen. 

It is easy for people to judge sorority women, it happens every day. What people need to see is that, yes, we are just a bunch of college girls with matching t-shirts and funny hand symbols, but we are so much more than that. We support each other through hard times. We are leaders. We are helpers. We are scholars. We are sisters. We are sorority women.