I vividly remember that when the topic of recruitment came up with my mother around my junior year of high school, I was adamantly against it. There was a stigma ingrained into my mind about the "type" of girl that joined a sorority: tall, skinny, blonde, beautiful, with the Instagram of a super model and the personality of a beauty show contestant. But when I finally settled on the school I now attend--a university with approximately three times the amount of undergraduate students I had previously wanted--my mother encouraged me to at least go through the process. "It can't hurt," she said. "Worst case scenario, you hate it and drop out."
And the process is definitely scary. Compiling recommendations, submitting resumes, talking to other girls about their experiences--it was overwhelming. I walked into recruitment with zero expectations and a bundle full of nerves, and although my friends who had already begun the process warned me that there was honestly no way to really prepare yourself for what it's like to walk into a sorority house on day one, there was no way to prepare yourself for what it's like. A door opens and there are hundreds of girls with big smiles and loud voices cheering and beckoning you into your house, and the first day, I genuinely thought that I'd landed myself in the worst situation.
But recruitment is not just made up of the scary stories. There are the good ones, too--like how close you do become with your Pi Chi groups, since all of you are huddled together in the heat all day every day; how amazing it feels to have a genuine conversation with a girl in your favorite house and have it feel like home; talking to girls in different sororities and realizing that you, too, could be a part of something so big and wonderful and incredible as that sisterhood.
It's hot, yes. And it's going to be emotional; girls cry when they get cut from houses they love, when they get cut from houses they don't, during philanthropy round, during pref round, on Bid Day. But it's also going to be amazingly worthwhile and incredibly rewarding. I stumbled my way through recruitment not totally understanding what the process was or what it meant, and now a year later, I'm cheering alongside my sisters trying to welcome the new pledge class the same way the older girls did before me.
Despite the anxiety, the worries, the endless "what-if" scenarios, it all works out the way it is meant to. And even though people describe recruitment as the worst experience of their lives, you should also ask those girls what it feels like to be in their sorority now. Every Friday morning, I walk into my sorority house to eat brunch with 200 plus sisters, all of us wearing big t-shirts with no makeup on, laughing about some ridiculous video while shoveling our faces with food, and it feels like home.
