UGA sorority tradition: Young and in a rush

[snopes]

In a seventh-floor room in Brumby Hall, an all-female dormitory, 18-year-old Kesley Naschek stacked boxes and talked about her upcoming week.

Naschek, a Dunwoody High School graduate, said she's trying not to take it all so seriously.

But she has heard the rumors that recruitment week at UGA can be brutal. There's an urban legend about the shower heads in Brumby, she said.

"They're low so that girls can't hang themselves if they don't get in the sorority they want," Naschek said.

http://www.ajc.com/metro/content/met...tart_0812.html

[Towknie]

The whole system of sorority rush always befuddled me. I suppose the main reason it is the way it is is to ensure some kind of parity in membership numbers among the houses on any given campus.

In the fraternities, on the other hand, a prospect can pretty much go from house to house collecting bids, and choose where he'd like to go. More freedom of choice, but it left some houses really, really big, and others really, really small.

[Zorro]

We were told this same reason as to why our showerheads were so low in my all-female dorm. A more likely reason, one of the professors said, was because my dorm was built in the sixties, the time of beehive hairdos, and girls might not have wanted to wash their hair(do) out every day, and with the showerhead so low, they could cleanse their bodies but not get their hair wet.

[STF]

My sister went to UGA. I'm trying to remember if she was in Brumby Hall or not though. It had two nicknames. At the beginning of the year it was "The Virgin Vault" and later it becomes "Nine Floors of Whores." We were so proud.

I think she rushed, but she ended up in a business fraternity instead of sorority.

[Tarquin Farquart]

"They're low so that girls can't hang themselves if they don't get in the sorority they want," Naschek said.

I'm guessing there are other ways to hang yourself.

[Brad from Georgia]

My wife lived in Brumby Hall when she was an undergraduate at UGA. She says shower heads don't enter into it. If you wanted to commit suicide, you just ate at the student dining room, Snelling Hall.

[erinker74]

Originally Posted by Towknie

The whole system of sorority rush always befuddled me. I suppose the main reason it is the way it is is to ensure some kind of parity in membership numbers among the houses on any given campus.

In the fraternities, on the other hand, a prospect can pretty much go from house to house collecting bids, and choose where he'd like to go. More freedom of choice, but it left some houses really, really big, and others really, really small.

I was in a sorority at Kansas University and got in many disputes with the Panhellenic Committee over this very topic! Sorority Rush is the most ridiculous, arcahic, soul-stealing, worthless week EVER! And it's not just hell on the pledges - the actives spend the entire week getting about two hours of sleep a night, eating meals during the two-minute window between parties, memorizing mind-numbing songs, performing all day in the heat, setting up & tearing down & setting up the house again, all the while being expected to remember the names and indivdual personalities of up to 100 girls a day! It's brutal, and it sucks!

It is also (obviously) brutal on the pledges. It is nothing but a gantlet of judgment and superficiality.

Fraternity rush is the way to go: visit a bunch of parties and decide which one you like. Done and done.

[STF]

Ultimately though it's all self-inflicted so I don't really feel bad for actives or pledges. You can simply choose not to join a sorority. I ended up going to a school that was more of a commuter campus, but I wouldn't have joined a fraternity if I had attended Alabama or Georgia Southern. It's just not something I was interested in. Does it suck for those who want to be a part of this? Yes, but you're subjecting yourself to that. It's not as if you don't have a choice.

[Astra]

At Mississippi State, I was on campus the week before school started to attend band camp. It's the same time as the sorority rush.

I'd never seen anything like it. Huge packs of girls in cocktail dresses would be walking back and forth between the dorms and the sorority houses at all hours of the day and night. I heard bits and pieces of conversation about the parties and the tasks girls had to perform as part of the process. That doesn't even count the fraternity parties that they were also expected to attend.

Other students thought it was unusual that the school had rush before classes started (is that uncommon?). Kind of like the UGA shower rumor, some said that the reason was because some girls would not attend the school if they did not make it into their choice sorority, either by going to another college or by committing suicide.

[E. Q. Taft]

Originally Posted by Astra

Huge packs of girls in cocktail dresses...

OK, anything that involves huge packs of girls in cocktail dresses can't be all bad....

No, I got it.

[Esprise Me]

Irrelevant personal note: I chose my college partly on the basis of the absence of Greek life on campus. There are only two co-ed fraternities, and neither provides housing; they're more like volunteer organizations. I wouldn't touch that sorrority rush nonsense with a 39-and-a-half-foot pole.

[Maque]

I go to one of the largest party schools in the nation (and as a chick who hates to party, that wasn't a smart idea) but announcements for whom made it into the sororities came out a few weeks ago.

Girls who made it in were screaming and partying in their rooms for hours.

Girls who didn't make it in where sequestered in their room (directly next to mine) screaming and crying and bawling for a good week. I did hear about a bajillion "I...I might as well die!"s.

As a side note, when my ex-roommate was rushing, she'd be up all night talking on her phone and keeping me awake, yelling and whining if I dared to complain about an 8AM class. One morning she had to be awake at 8 AM to go to some rush thing, and she got really mad at me because at 10 PM I was playing a video game. Needless to say, we didn't really last long as roommates.

Originally Posted by Maque

Girls who didn't make it in where sequestered in their room (directly next to mine) screaming and crying and bawling for a good week. I did hear about a bajillion "I...I might as well die!"s.

After reading all this thread, I hope my daughters (and son) continue the GDI tradition of their parents and grandparents.

[Cervus]

Originally Posted by Zorro

We were told this same reason as to why our showerheads were so low in my all-female dorm. A more likely reason, one of the professors said, was because my dorm was built in the sixties, the time of beehive hairdos, and girls might not have wanted to wash their hair(do) out every day, and with the showerhead so low, they could cleanse their bodies but not get their hair wet.

Interesting hijack:

I've always wondered why the shower head in my apartment is so low. The peephole in the front door is at chin level, and I can touch my ceiling with my fingertips. I'm guessing the architect might have been, er, vertically challenged. Are any other parts of those dorms designed for short people?

[Mickey is a gyrl]

One sorority at my school is rumored to be the all-superficial sorority. Up until a few years ago, all of their members were blond (I'm not kidding...although there may have been one or two brunettes thrown into the mix), thin, wearing the most popular items at the time. Instead of study hours, they had workout hours, and one of the rush things they'd do is tell the rush class that they had to wear a bikini, then they would be blindfolded and brought to the frat that was their "brother", where the frat boys would tell the actives what needed to be improved on the rushes' bodies, and the actives would circle it with sharpie, telling them that they need to work on it, or else they won't be accepted.

How brutal.

[Loyhargil]

Originally Posted by erinker74

I was in a sorority at Kansas University and got in many disputes with the Panhellenic Committee over this very topic! Sorority Rush is the most ridiculous, arcahic, soul-stealing, worthless week EVER! And it's not just hell on the pledges - the actives spend the entire week getting about two hours of sleep a night, eating meals during the two-minute window between parties, memorizing mind-numbing songs, performing all day in the heat, setting up & tearing down & setting up the house again, all the while being expected to remember the names and indivdual personalities of up to 100 girls a day! It's brutal, and it sucks!

It is also (obviously) brutal on the pledges. It is nothing but a gantlet of judgment and superficiality.

Fraternity rush is the way to go: visit a bunch of parties and decide which one you like. Done and done.

Perfect, perfect description there. I was in the Greek system at Washburn. That pretty much sums the whole thing up there, too.

Of course, at Washburn, I had a bit more incentive to go through the process. The price of living there was cheaper than most apartments, the proximity to campus was amazing, and the housing was in better shape than the dorms for a comparable price. Not to mention, yay, free laundry!!!!

I'm not the most social person, though, so boy howdy, that took some adjustments.

[Cervus]

I have never understood the appeal of a sorority or frat. Why exactly do they exist, I mean, what's their purpose?

Originally Posted by Mickey is a gyrl

One sorority at my school is rumored to be the all-superficial sorority. Up until a few years ago, all of their members were blond (I'm not kidding...although there may have been one or two brunettes thrown into the mix), thin, wearing the most popular items at the time.

I thought that was true of most, if not all, sororities - that they are cliques composed of shallow girls who look and think exactly alike, who have some deep need to be surrounded by other plastic people they can call friends. The majority of my college friends believe this is true, and the Greeks themselves don't do much to dispel that image.

I was driving past campus one day and one of the sororities was having some formal shindig on their front lawn...several dozen blonde, thin Paris Hilton lookalikes wearing similar designer dresses and strappy heeled sandals. It was scary because they were all perfectly coiffed clones of each other.

[Lancastrian]

I was shocked to discover that my mother was in a sorority when she was at BU, as she's never been the 'Greek type' in all the years I've known her. It turns out hers was an education-oriented sorority and she joined for the good housing. For her 'rush' she had to participate in a literature analysis debate.

[STF]

One thing that frats and sororities offer members is networking which could help during a job search and beyond.

[Towknie]

Originally Posted by STF

One thing that frats and sororities offer members is networking which could help during a job search and beyond.

The actual operations of the fraternity are an education unto themselves. You've got to learn to deal with accounting books, budgets, accounts payable and receivable, protocol, event planning, housing management, and numerous other things that prepare you for the business world in later life. For those with aspirations in the political world, the politics of intra-chapter, national fraternity, and campuswide fraternity council offer numerous opportunities to don a suit, get up in front of people, and tell lots of lies through a shit eating grin.

Oddly enough, I never see any fraternities "advertise" these facets. The official party line tends to be "We create good men and give money to charity". Um, what they really do is teach men how to function with a hangover and throw about $1000 per chapter towards a charity (exceptions obviously exist).

There's also a kind of commodification in the whole dating thing. Fraternity boys and sorority girls tend to exclude the "independents" from their dating pool. I recall going to a campuswide presentation to freshman for fraternities, and the idiot doing the presentation actually said something along the lines of "we're the only people with access to the sorority girls!"

I dunno. I had fun in the fraternity for a while, but got myself early alumni status for my senior year because I was sick of it by then. I most certainly have been at odds with them after graduation as they just ask me for money while going in a direction that I don't see as being at all positive.