I’ll be honest with you — I never had any intention of joining a sorority. It wasn’t that I specifically had anything against it or fell into the idea of negative stigmas, it was just simply something that had never caught my attention. Sure, the stereotypes of sorority girls in movies and TV shows didn’t help, but this wasn’t what kept me away. I’m the kind of person who needs that extra push to do something out of their comfort zone, and I am so grateful for the people in my life who don’t let me stay in my own bubble.
Sorority recruitment for the spring of 2017 was just around the corner, and my close friends were so excited to find their future homes and become a part of something bigger. All of fall semester and winter break, they had made their best efforts to convince me to go out for it, to attend meet the sisters at potential houses, and to get a feel of what I would be going into if I decided to follow through with it.
After several conversations going back and forth, I finally decided that I would never know what I missed out on if I didn’t just give it a chance. Nervous doesn’t describe how I felt leading up to rush; I worried I wouldn’t fit in anywhere and would have to mull through awkward conversation after awkward conversation. I also feared that I wouldn’t get called back anywhere and still had only a surface level understanding of Greek life.
I think I speak for most girls when I tell you this feeling only really lasts before your first house, and you then come to the realization that these conversations should be casual and you shouldn’t psych yourself out.
This isn’t to say that I felt comfortable everywhere I went, and I truly didn’t understand what people meant when they said, “when you know, you know."
I had the best conversation at my sorority, Zeta Tau Alpha, and the rest was history. Since then, I can genuinely say that this has easily been one of the best decisions I could have made in college, and sometimes you will have to step out of your comfort zone to find where you belong. You have a never-ending support system of over one hundred girls who all care about you and want to see you succeed. In addition, you are opening up to networking opportunities with girls who hope to follow similar career paths.
Above all, you can take pride knowing that everything you do is going towards a good cause, and while there may be moments of stress with the workload accompanied by sororities, nothing replaces the feeling of helping others with sisters who will experience it all by your side.