As the semester comes to a close, hundreds of Washington University women are completing their first semesters as members of the Greek community. Joining a sorority, though a common choice on campus, often brings with it unexpected elements. It seems that many women don’t know what to expect from their experience. The members of Scene staff have chosen to reflect on their individual experiences and share what they wish they had known before going through recruitment.

Laura Harvey

I saw Greek life as an opportunity to meet a lot of new people all the time, but my experience has been very different. I have actually made several new extremely close friends—shout out to my pledge family—but the social experience isn’t what I envisioned in the fall, having heard stories from my friends at other schools who rushed in August or September. Sure, I meet maybe one new person per week through mixers and philanthropy events, but the vast majority of my time is spent with the same 10 or so girls. While I now have dozens more people who will wave to me in the DUC or smile at me in Whispers, I have gained only a few “sisters” in reality. In the end, though, I think that makes the experience more meaningful; I’ll take quality over quantity any day.

Claudia Vaughan
The one thing I most wish I had known prior to joining Wash. U. Greek life is that it is not all-consuming. When I came to Wash. U., most of my high school friends had chosen to attend state schools, where Greek life is a far more formal and time-consuming ordeal. Seeing their schools’ systems, I think, scared me out of going through recruitment initially, and thus it was not until sophomore year that I joined a sorority. Yet once I did, I discovered that it is truly one’s own decision to decide how involved or uninvolved to be with a chapter. I love that I can tailor my level of involvement not only to fit my schedule but also to fit me and that with which I feel most comfortable.

Megan Magray

I realized that only first-semester freshmen put any credence in a chapter’s reputation and stereotype. After rush, you watch girls getting bids from places you never would have expected—I made so many assumptions that have turned out to be pretty much false. There are a handful of girls in every chapter that reinforce the “stereotype,” but no single person can be representative of an entire chapter.

Jessie Bluedorn

I had always bought into the classic sorority stereotypes—”you buy your friends,” “everyone is fake-nice to each other” and the overly joyful proclamations of “now I have 150 new sisters.” What I found after I went through it myself, however, was quite different from the superficiality I feared. Instead, I simply found a new pool of unique and interesting girls from which I’ve found a handful of close, genuine friends and even a new suitemate!

Kimberly Henrickson

Although I had often heard during first semester that rush was a relatively simple and easy process, I found it to actually be grueling and distressing. Older friends had told me that picking a sorority was just that: a choice made by the girl going through the process, and, naively, I believed them. I wasn’t prepared for the fact that being matched with the wrong person at a chapter would have the potential to make or break my chance of being invited back for the next day. Ultimately, I feel that almost everyone I know who ended up in a sorority has learned to love her chapter, whether or not it was her top choice. People say that rush shows you where you belong, but I disagree. Many girls could fit into multiple chapters; it’s all about finding yourself within the one you end up joining.

Eliana Goldstein

Rush was maybe the scariest thing I’ve ever done. When you sit down at those tables and start talking—no, when you walk into that room—you are opening yourself up to be judged. You’re blatantly asking to be judged. I came back from the first day wondering what the heck I was thinking signing up for this ordeal. “I’m not a sorority girl,” I thought. “I might be blonde and perky, but I’m too geeky/awkward/weird for this.” But I stuck with it and on bid day, I realized that I had managed to find a group of women as geeky, awkward and weird as me but in a vast constellation of different ways. Greek life offers a lot of things—leadership, service, parties—but the best part of it is the people.

Erica Sloan

Prior to joining Greek life, I had heard people explain what it was like to be in a sorority with elaborate claims such as “you instantly gain about 150 new friends that are always there for you no matter what.” This seemed a little grandiose to me and, being an only child, the idea of someone becoming my sister was simply foreign. After experiencing this first semester in a sorority, I now completely understand what it means to say that sisters always have your back. The network of connections I have on campus and beyond is instantly exponentially larger since joining a sorority, but somehow with this breadth, there is no loss in depth of friendships and, in fact, the opposite happens. Even just this past weekend, when I was feeling sick with a stomach virus, I was flooded with text and Facebook messages—some from girls whom I had never spoken to in person—offering to bring me saltines, ginger ale and anything else I needed. People always say you get out of it what you put in, and I think this is actually true: as long as you reach out to other sisters in your chapter, they honestly do reach back.