Every summer, incoming freshmen and transfer students start Googling things like "how to prepare for rush" and come back with the same recycled advice: research chapters, practice talking about yourself, dress well. And honestly, some of that is fine. But a lot of what gets passed around as recruitment prep is either useless filler or actively counterproductive. I went through recruitment as a sophomore - which meant I had a full year of watching people do this wrong before I did it myself - and even then I made some dumb calls about where to put my energy.
...
Read more
Cornell just banned fraternity parties at annex properties, and if you read that sentence and thought "okay, that sounds reasonable," you're missing the bigger story. The ban came through a Student Fraternity and Sorority Life representative who delivered the news directly to Greek life leadership. Not a vote. Not a committee process. A representative telling chapter leaders what the new rules are. That's the part that should make every inter-council officer sit up straight.
...
Read more
Cornell's president just put Greek life on notice in a way that's hard to dismiss. According to CBS News, Cornell's president said Greek life should end permanently if it can't be proven safe. Not suspended. Not restructured. Permanently ended. That's not a threat you make to sound tough at a press conference - that's a statement of actual intent, and every Greek organization on that campus should be taking it seriously.
...
Read more
Nobody hands you a manual when you go Greek. You get a bid card, maybe a handshake, and then you're just kind of expected to figure out the rest by watching and occasionally embarrassing yourself. I did plenty of both. And looking back from the other side of graduation, there's a pretty long list of things I wish someone had just said out loud during my first semester instead of letting me learn them the hard way.
...
Read more
Every fall, Panhellenic councils across the country run the same expensive, exhausting, highly regulated circus called formal recruitment. Thousands of potential new members rotating through chapter houses in coordinated outfits, chapters rehearsing their talking points, advisors sweating over quota math. And every spring - or whenever formal ends with chapters still under quota - informal recruitment quietly does what formal couldn't. I've worked both sides of this from a council seat. They are not the same thing, and pretending they are is how chapters end up confused about which one actually serves them.
...
Read more
Greek life runs on the idea that the people doing the selecting are actually trying to find the right fit - that when a chapter invites someone back, it's because something real clicked. That's the story we tell ourselves, and a lot of the time, I believe it. But when a chapter is accused of systematically cutting women of color from recruitment because of their race, that story falls apart. And that's exactly what's being alleged at UCSB's Alpha Phi chapter right now.
...
Read more
I'm not gonna pretend the job market in 2023 was friendly. It wasn't. I graduated with a communications degree from a mid-sized state school, a solid GPA, and about three months of genuine panic about what came next. What I didn't expect was that the thing that actually moved the needle wasn't my resume or my LinkedIn profile. It was a text from a chapter alumna I'd met exactly twice at an alumnae brunch.
...
Read more
Every fraternity house has one. A shared drive, a binder on a shelf, a folder in someone's email chain - years of old exams, professor-specific notes, highlighted study guides passed down like they're sacred texts. And the weird thing is, almost nobody talks about it openly. Not the brothers who use it, not the advisors who probably know it exists, not the university offices that would rather look the other way. The test bank is one of Greek life's open secrets, and I think it's time somebody actually said something real about it.
...
Read more
