The 96th Miss America pageant, will be held at the Boardwalk Hall in Atlantic City, New Jersey, on Sunday, September 11, 2016. In total, there are 52 young women competing for the title of Miss America 2017. 17 of the 52 are currently or were recently active in a sorority. Let’s highlight the sisters who are representing their chapters on the grand stage....
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You have made one of the biggest decisions of your life to go to college. Congratulations! However, that’s not the only decision that you’ll have to make when it comes to college life. Another important decision that you’ll probably make is the decision to go Greek in college.
Greek life has lots of benefits to offer to its members – opportunities to build a network, social/community activities to participate in, a strong brotherhood bond to maintain, and many more! However, one of the biggest challenges college guys face at the beginning of their Greek life is choosing the right fraternity for themselves....
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There's this whole invisible architecture to Greek social life that nobody explains during recruitment. You find out about it gradually - through casual comments, through noticing patterns, through eventually asking someone older in your chapter why you keep seeing the same fraternities at every sorority philanthropy event. The answer is almost never random. Greek social calendars are political in a way that took me a while to fully appreciate, and I say that as someone who didn't join until sophomore year and had zero context for any of it.
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Every school thinks their Greek Week is the best. And honestly, most of them are wrong - but in the most entertaining way possible. I spent four years watching our council try to one-up itself every spring, and by senior year I had enough context to know that some schools are genuinely doing something special while others are just running a slightly competitive field day with matching t-shirts. There's a difference. A big one.
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When I first heard that Greek life at the University of Minnesota is expanding onto 17th Avenue, my immediate reaction was something between "interesting" and "okay, but at what cost." Because housing is never just housing when it comes to Greek organizations. Where chapters live shapes everything - recruitment, culture, alumni relationships, and how the rest of campus perceives you.
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Transfer students get handed a weird set of rules the moment they step on campus. They're expected to settle in fast, make friends fast, figure out a new school fast - and then, somewhere in that chaos, they're also supposed to figure out Greek recruitment on a timeline that was never designed with them in mind. I've sat in enough Panhellenic meetings to know that the system doesn't exactly roll out the welcome mat. And most councils aren't even embarrassed about it.
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A Wall Street Journal piece dropped recently about the rise of sorority rush consultants, and I've been thinking about it ever since. Not because it's shocking - honestly, it's not - but because it captures something that's been quietly shifting in Greek life for a while now, and I'm not sure we're talking about it honestly enough.
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There's a pattern most people don't talk about honestly. A fraternity gets suspended - national headlines, campus outrage, a stern statement from the university - and then six months later everyone kind of forgets about it. Then it happens again. Different chapter, same script. And if you've spent any real time in Greek life, you already know which houses on your campus are perpetually one incident away from losing their charter.
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When a fraternity chapter reaches an agreement with its university to resolve hazing allegations, there are usually two ways people react. Half the campus shrugs and says the chapter got off easy. The other half inside Greek life breathes a sigh of relief and hopes everyone moves on quickly. Neither reaction is really doing the work of understanding what actually happened or what it means going forward.
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There's a Her Campus piece floating around right now about a woman who didn't join a sorority, spent some time with serious FOMO about it, and then eventually found her people and got over it. And look, I read the whole thing. As a guy who spent four years in a fraternity and watched plenty of friends go through the exact same spiral from the other side of it, I have some thoughts.
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