Justin Marinelli
Writer

Now that we’ve had some time to adapt to our new roles, brothers and sisters, perhaps we should be asking ourselves whether rush actually works. While many of my compatriots are delighted with how all the proceedings have turned out, some have discovered they don’t feel quite so fuzzy about their new brothers and sisters and are already considering a quiet withdrawal. Because the overwhelming majority of people are immensely happy with where they ended up, I would argue that the process works.

For men looking to join a fraternity, the process is rather simple. You visit all the fraternities, and after a ton of free food and all the “bro-flirting” you can handle, you pick your top three you’d like to eat meals with. The fraternities also pick who they’d like back. The requests are matched up, and you eat lunch and dinner at the fraternities that you got meal bids from for the next three days. After that, you pick your top two fraternities, they vote on whom they would like to give bids to, and as long as everything matches up, you say hello to your new brothers!

I’ll admit, most of what I know about sorority rush stems from the article Siobhan Murray ’15 wrote last week on how the suspension of Pi Beta Phi sorority affected recruitment. That said, I will do my best to give a brief summary. It seems mostly the same as fraternity rush, except instead of doing it on your own, you do it in groups (for reasons never explained to me) led by a “neutral recruitment counselor,” and you apparently do a lot of singing.

After this, a mutual selection process whittles down the number of girls visiting each sorority until the girls pick their top two sororities, and the sororities pick to whom they’d like to offer bids. An interesting quirk of this is that while the guys get their official bids on Thursday, the girls have to wait until Friday to find out where they ended up.

Additional differences are present as well. Sorority rush apparently has taboo topics, set times when you can go to the bathroom and is generally considered to be far more stressful. Fraternity rush has far fewer guidelines and actually involves going to houses. The food, despite being free, is excellent. I had dishes like steak, lobster and ribs (although sadly not all at the same time).

Now, the big question is, does the process work? I would say it does. While I know some people that aren’t too happy about where they ended up, those are in the minority. For men, 226 were placed in fraternities (as of this writing, the official numbers for sororities have not been released). The overwhelming majority of people are immensely happy with where they ended up. That tells me the process works. It may not be perfect, but I highly doubt any process would be. Roughly half the campus is Greek, and you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who isn’t happy after having rushed. Rush works.