Whether you "went greek" or not, we're all familiar with the yelling, primping, and matching outfits (the endless, endless matching outfits) that come with the typical sorority recruitment. There are few traditions so widely ridiculed and criticized that also remain almost unchanged year after year, decade after decade. Sure, the t-shirt designs have evolved since my mother went through recruitment in the '90s, but recruitment is still the same sorority girls wearing identical shirts, pants, shoes, and painful toothpaste-commercial smiles inexplicably bouncing, finger-clapping, and screaming cultlike chants at wide-eyed freshman wearing YouTube tutorial faces of makeup.

I met amazing women during recruitment who ran service and social justice organizations, spoke multiple languages, and cared deeply about their sisters, then watched them file into a kindergarten-straight line and begin robotically finger-clapping (seriously, wtf is up with finger-clapping?). I found kindred spirits in places that an often-pretentious English major like myself would never expect, but I also encountered women who wrinkled their nose at my frizzy, unstraightened curls after I sprinted in my too-high heels to get to their house on time. Potential New Members and recruiters alike understand that there is A LOT about recruitment that does not make sense. Yet, somehow, the dangerously powerful "way we've always done it" has prevailed for years in spite of women who know better and want better.

But here's the thing: Nothing in 2020 is "the way we've always done it." We have the opportunity to improve the way we seek out sisters. It is sad and disappointing that the class of 2024 will not get to run home to a house filled with sparkly, yelling women and experience the explosion of hugs and cute t-shirts and glitter that I got to experience in 2018. I wish them a sweaty group photo with a bunch of girls they've just met. I wish them pink lemonade in cute glasses and tiny desserts. I even wish them awkward first-conversations at exchanges, but there are a lot of other things that I am glad they won't experience.

I was extremely skeptical about our ability to make connections and serve a new class of sisters virtually before my house's first day of virtual work week, where I had some of the best conversations I've ever had with my sisters in zoom breakout rooms, of all places. The pandemic has left us exhausted, anxious, and scared, but it has also made us honest and given us a new level of empathy and compassion for each other. Hitting a collective rock bottom makes trying to keep up appearances seem futile, and this abandonment of pretenses makes genuine connection easier than ever before. The flimsy concept of social and public image that once ruled recruitment is officially obsolete in the age of pandemic, and I am not mad about it.

Virtual recruitment is an equalizer that could only be topped by a Love is Blind style recruitment (Lauren and Cameron forever!!). You can't tell what size jeans a girl wears over zoom. You can't tell if she got her platform sandals from Goodwill or Guess unless she opts to wear them around her neck, which probably won't be super flattering. Much less revolutionary but groundbreaking in the hair department, my fellow curly girls will be THRIVING tucked away indoors, safe from the humidity. 2020 recruitment could turn into the dismantling that the Panhellenic system so desperately needs: a move away from conformity, shallow image-obsession, and the glorifying of white, straight, cis-gendered, single-minded feminity that didn't belong in the 1800s and certainly does not belong in 2020. It's time to put away our Spanx and nude heels and figure out what it means to be a sister to ALL women in an arena where for the first time ever, what we have to say matters the most.