I was the first person in my immediate family to go Greek. My parents thought I was crazy for wanting to be in a sorority. They thought I was paying for my friends and that my grades would suffer. They also saw movies and heard about how Greeks are bad people thanks to the media. But I was determined to join a sorority. My first semester of freshman year, I went through sorority recruitment and accepted a bid to my first choice sorority. Since going Greek, my parents have become more open minded about the Greek community. They still think that some aspects are dumb but that is because they don't get it. Here are some misconceptions I've heard from people.
1. The "paying for your friends" is total BS. Just a lot of clubs or organizations, you pay a fee to join. Sorority women pay a fee to be a part of that specific organization. And you make friends no matter what organization you join! Wow! You also pay money to go to school and you make friends there, so you are "paying for your friends" as well.
2. All we do is party. Yes, some sorority women like to go out but not all of them. I enjoy going out once and a while but most nights, I'd rather stay in and chill with my sisters and eat pizza. A lot of my sisters are the same way. Sorority women also do more than go out. We participate in philanthropy events, go to study hours, keep our grades up, be goofy at sisterhood events, and so much more.
3. We alllll have daddy's credit card. LOL. Good one. I pay for my sorority dues and T-shirts on my own. So do a lot of other girls. My parents told me from the get go that they wouldn't be paying my sorority expenses. I fork out $350 just for our dues alone and even more for t-shirts and other events. This all comes out of my pocket and I'm proud to say that. Yes, some sisters have their parents pay for sorority dues but not all parents are like that.
4. We're dumb. Believe it or not, a lot of sorority women are very bright. To be in my chapter, you need a 2.5 GPA but a lot of girls get over a 3.0 every semester. Some girls even get 4.0s! A lot of us also have challenging majors like nursing, biology, and chemistry. We work hard and school always comes first.
5. We only date fraternity guys. I know a bunch of sorority women who date guys that aren't in a fraternity. The main reason why a lot of us date fraternity men though is because they are in the same social circle as us. We spend homecomings, Greek Weeks, and other social events together. But like I said, I have friends that date men that don't go to SEMO, date athletes, and date GDIs.
6. We all look alike. Looking at just my sorority alone, we have so many diverse girls. We all don't look like cookie cutter clones of each other. We have girls of different ethnicities, races, sexuality, age, looks, size, and so on. Looking at the rest of the sororities, they all have diverse girls as well.
Sorority life is not how the media portrays us and hearing these misconceptions makes me sad. We work hard to help our philanthropies, to better ourselves, and to better our community.
