With a new semester just around the corner, there's one thing on every sorority girl's mind: the upcoming recruitment season. For my school, our formal recruitment is in the spring, which means it's time to get our game faces on. This is the season where we have a structure to follow, dress codes to follow, and of course a grand bid day.

Bid day is the day to celebrate our new sisters, who just received their bids. We will make tutus for the special occasions while coating our bodies in glitter because why not? Overall bid day is what you make of it, but there's one crucial item that holds special meaning to all involved: the Bid Day Shirt. These shirts, usually theme oriented, hold a special place in every sisters heart.

For the new girls this shirt represents the moment they joined Greek Life. It's a special item that will remind you of one of your happiest college memories. It's also the first item you have from your sorority to wear, which you will probably wear the next day to show everyone on campus you found your home away from home. Even if it's not necessarily your style you hold on to that shirt, possibly making it into a t-shirt quilt in the future.

For the older sisters the new bid day shirts should still mean something to you, even though that's not always the case. It could be the bid day shirt from when your Little got in, which reminds you of how far your relationship has come since that day. Or maybe it's the shirt from your first recruitment season as an active sister, where you finally got to see things from the other side. No matter what, each bid day shirt has a memory attached to it and is a way to remember your time as a member. I can not for a second think of getting rid of any of my bid day shirts, because they hold so much meaning for me.

The reason this article was so important to me is because I have seen how sisters feel when they don't get a bid day shirt. Older members say "well that's just how it is" or "I mean I don't see why the shirt is so important," because if we get shirts during informal recruitment we may have to pay more money. What they can't remember is how it felt when they got their shirt, well if they were rushing during formal recruitment. That shirt means so much to the new sisters and helps them remember the moment they got accepted into a lifelong sisterhood. So yeah while it may have been the norm to not get shirts before, it doesn't mean we can't start a new tradition.