This past fall I had the amazing opportunity to join and colonize a new Chapter of Alpha Omicron Pi. Colonizing a sorority was a special opportunity to take on. Me and 120 other wonderful women were chosen to take on the responsibility of building our chapter and helping it to thrive. It's was not an easy task, but we were blessed with a challenge.

Recruitment week was great but as many of us can agree it was kind of nerve wracking and even stressful. So when Bid day finally came along we were able to relax and let loose and take the time to get to know our knew 120+ sisters. It was a day to just celebrate and have fun. We spent time getting to know each other going through our awesome gift bags and learning AOII songs and learning things about one another.

After the wonder of bid day was over the real work began. As I said earlier it wasn't easy. It was fun, and we were ecstatic but it was definitely lots of hard work and time to put in to make our chapter what it is today. We all came in knowing that it would be so special to build and create a new chapter of AOII. I think that's something we could all 100% agree on, we were so proud to say we were the founding members of our chapter.

The meetings soon began and committees were created. We were led by two incredible AOII women who's job were to teach us everything we needed to know and to help us get through our colonization period. They were there to help whenever we needed, but they allowed us to take the reigns and learn from one another what was best for our chapter.

We didn't have the typical sorority experience. We didn't get big sisters to guide us, we didn't come into a group with the way mapped out for us. We created it on our own. We began traditions and we began families. We created things only to re evaluate and re build to help us become even stronger. We had long meetings voting on all these things that we wanted to put into place and we had long discussions about how to create positive presence on campus and how to become involved. We were building our entire chapter and our entire presence at the same time. It was a lot of work.

But that's what made it so special to us. That's what made our bond so strong. That's what made us exceed the expectation.

All sorority experiences take hard work but the fact that we created our experience together made us even stronger and closer than we would have imagined. We are 100+ individual and unique women who came together to create and build something we will be able to look back on and smile forever.

To all my Theta Sigma Founding sisters, I love you all.

Roses.