Several changes altered this year’s fall fraternity rush, from shortening the actual rush period to adjusting bid acceptances and excluding all closed rush events.

Junior Matt Eshelbrenner, vice president of recruitment for the Inter-Fraternity Council (IFC), said that the changes were made because fewer students rush in the fall.

“Fall rush is never as big as spring rush, so we decided to modify our fall rush in order to make it more user-friendly to the pledges,” said Eshelbrenner.

He said that in the fall, four to eight people rush each fraternity, compared to the 20 students that rush each fraternity in the spring. Additionally, most of the fall rushees are either transfer students or upperclassmen who already have a good idea of the fraternity they would like to join.

“This isn’t like spring rush when there’re hundreds of freshman who don’t really know which house they want and attend all the events trying to find where they fit,” said Eshelbrenner. “Houses were throwing away money on hosting large events for their fraternities to attract so few rushees during fall.”

In years past, fall rush lasted for three weeks. Two weeks were reserved for open events and the final week was saved for closed events. During open rush weeks, fraternities hosted events open to all people and during closed rush, fraternities invited prospective pledges to special, more intimate house activities. Bids were then handed out after closed rush events.

Because the three-week period was too long for so small a rush group, the IFC, in conjunction with Karin Johnes, the Greek Life coordinator, decided to modify the rules for fall rush. They changed the rush period to just one week and allowed fraternities to host only open events.

Eshelbrenner said that the changes make the process easier for students who want to rush a specific house.

“When you have so few people rushing [during fall], the houses know which rush they want after all the open events, so there’s no need for any closed events,” said Eshelbrenner.

Junior Jon Mandel, rush chair of Kappa Sigma fraternity, didn’t like the shortening of the fall rush period.

“Personally, I did not like the fact that rush was only one week,” said Mandel. “It was much harder to try to get to know the guys who were interested in our house.”

The process of accepting bids was also changed for fall rush. In the past, the rushes were given a specific date to accept a certain bid from a fraternity. Eshelbrenner said that this year, the bid acceptance is not specific.

“During fall there’s not as much cross-rushing because usually the sophomores know what house they want to rush, which is why we can give out bids one day and have no specific acceptance date,” said Eshelbrenner.

Mandel said that he didn’t like the open acceptance date.

“It basically forced us to make decisions earlier than we might have wanted to,” said Mandel. “We had to make our bid acceptance comparable with other houses and that meant putting it as early as possible, which means handing bids out as early as possible.”

Sophomore Matt Weinstein, a transfer student who rushed this past week, said that he enjoyed the process.

“It was low-key, [without] much pressure, and [it was] just about meeting people and having fun,” said Weinstein. “The rush period didn’t seem too short because you still get time to mull it over and decide what’s right for you.”

As of yet, Eshelbrenner said that there are no modifications to spring rush.

“We have all semester, but, still, these weren’t any huge changes, just some formalities,” said Eshelbrenner.

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