August is a slow month of Greek philanthropy efforts, but by September the frequency of events usually begins to pick up. On many campuses across the country, these are the first Greek philanthropic events of the year and many of the new member’s first opportunities to partake in one of the greatest facets of Greek life. Take a look at some of the most noteworthy philanthropic events of September 2017....
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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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Every chapter has them. The philanthropy events you drag yourself to because you have to, the ones where you spend three hours standing in a parking lot pretending to care about the foam pit your treasurer rented for sixty bucks. And then there are the ones that somehow become highlights of the whole semester. I've done both. Plenty of both. Here's how you tell the difference before you commit your entire Saturday to something that's gonna feel like community service in the worst way possible.
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There's a column making the rounds from The Huntington News - a student asking why their friends are acting different after sorority recruitment. And honestly, I get why that question is being asked. From the outside, joining a Greek organization can look like a personality transplant. New friends, new schedule, new inside jokes you're not part of. It's disorienting if you're the one left watching it happen.
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Every year, thousands of students show up to recruitment events with a mental picture built from short-form video content and older siblings' highlight reels. Matching outfits, coordinated dances, tearful bid day hugs. And then they walk into an actual recruitment round and spend forty-five minutes making small talk with strangers in a loud room while someone checks their name off a clipboard. That gap between expectation and reality is where most of the genuine stress of rush lives - and nobody in an official capacity wants to talk about it honestly.
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Saint Louis University just suspended Alpha Eta Rho fraternity over what the school is calling a 'physical hazing incident.' No additional details have been made public yet - no timeline, no description of what actually happened, no word on how long the suspension will last. Just the announcement and the label. And honestly, that combination of vagueness and severity is something I've watched play out on campuses enough times now that it barely surprises me anymore. That's a problem worth thinking about.
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Nobody talks about academic probation like it actually happens. You hear about it in whispers, or you see a chapter go quiet on social media for a semester, or someone mentions it offhand at a philanthropy event. But the truth is that almost every chapter - at some point - has been there. And the way a brotherhood handles it says more about who they are than any bid day photo ever could.
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A college in Pennsylvania just suspended all Greek activities after antisemitic and sexist comments surfaced within its chapters. That's the sentence. Read it again if you need to. Because somehow, in 2024, we're still here - a whole campus community paying the price because a handful of people in letters decided that kind of talk was acceptable behind closed doors.
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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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