Sorority experiences are mostly talked about as good and life-changing. They definitely can be, but that’s not the whole story. People don’t like to talk about the times that their sorority or sorority sisters failed them, but it happens maybe a lot more often than anyone realizes. Sure, there are the fun bonding nights, late night gossip sessions, and 3 a.m. Denny’s or IHOP runs when everything is going well, but what about when things aren’t going so well? Are those sisters who promised to be there through thick and thin actually there for you or do they leave you do deal with things by yourself? I learned a lot from my sorority experience - a lot of important life lessons that I’m glad I learned while I was in college and not later in life.

You can’t trust authority figures to care about you, even if they are supposed to care. That was an interesting lesson for me because although I kind of knew it from some of the activities I pursued earlier in life, I had witnessed authority figures who did genuinely care about most of the members.

People don’t change. There’s always drama and judgment between people. I was hoping that the petty drama about relationships, cliques and personal choices would have been left in high school, but I learned quickly that they persist through college and perhaps even into the workplace.

You can’t trust people to be there for you. This was a hard one for me to learn. I was going through a hard period in my life and needed people I could rely on to be there for me, but that wasn’t something I was lucky enough to have during the majority of my time with my sorority; I always felt like an outsider. I ended up leaving the school and my sorority chapter and eventually things got better for me, I got the support I needed by changing my environment.

It wasn’t until I distanced myself from my chapter that I realized I had been presented with these lessons. While I sometimes wish I had the sorority experience I had heard so much about, I am usually grateful for the experience I did have. I don’t take things at face value as much as I used to because I know that there is always more going on than I know about. The longer I’m an alum, the more I realize the lessons that I learned from my time as an active.