Nobody ever explained to me why my fraternity was called what it was. Like, I knew the letters, I wore the letters, I had the letters embroidered on approximately seven hoodies. But the actual reason those specific Greek characters got slapped onto our house? Total mystery. Turns out there's a whole history behind this stuff, and it's way more interesting than the two-minute spiel you get during rush week.
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The weather is still pretty chilly across most of the US. Good thing sorority girls across the country have their “homes away from homes” to offer them shelter from the cold. Some of these homes are classics and some are brand new. In the fall we ranked the 10 Best Sorority Houses in America of Fall 2016. Now it’s time for our Spring 2017 rankings of the best sorority houses in America....
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Sororities at large state schools grab a lot of the attention. They’ve got thousands of PNMs to choose from and sisterhoods so big it’s difficult for members to really get close to each and every one of their sisters. I have a lot of respect for the tight sisterhoods found on the campuses with only 2,000 total students. It’s time someone put the spotlight on some of the best sororities at small colleges....
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Do you know if your current chapter house is the original house the past brothers or sisters of your fraternity or sorority have always called home? Is the original house still standing? Some chapters are lucky enough to live in a house steeped in tradition while others get to live in brand new homes with state-of-the-art amenities. Let us take a look at some throwback pictures of fraternity and sorority houses of the past and compare them to their modern day versions....
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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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If you're a freshman girl who just heard the word "recruitment" for the first time and your only reference point is TikTok montages of girls crying and jumping up and down in matching outfits - you are not alone, and you are also working with incomplete information. Panhellenic formal recruitment is one of the strangest, most structured, most genuinely meaningful processes on a college campus, and almost nobody explains it to you before you're already in it.
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Award ceremonies in Greek life get dismissed a lot. I get it - they can feel like a participation trophy situation where every chapter gets a plaque and everyone goes home feeling validated without anything actually changing. But the Ritter Awards at Mississippi State University are worth paying attention to, and not just because MSU's Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life put out a press release about it.
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When Greek life membership more than doubles at a university, you don't just shrug and move on. That's not a rounding error. That's not a fluke year. UA Little Rock's Greek system apparently did exactly that, and I think it deserves more than a feel-good headline and a pat on the back.
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I didn't go to my first real tailgate until I was a sophomore, and even then I showed up kind of skeptical. I'd spent my freshman year doing the GDI thing - watching football from dorms, maybe catching a game with friends who didn't care that much. When I finally got pulled into a full Greek row tailgate setup before a home game, I remember thinking: okay, this is actually something. Not because of the chaos or the crowd, but because there was clearly a tradition behind it. People knew what they were doing. They'd done this before, and their older brothers or sisters had done it before them, and it showed.
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Somewhere between orientation week and your first bid night, someone hands you an invisible spreadsheet. Nobody actually gives it to you - you just absorb it through the air like secondhand smoke. Suddenly you know which houses are "top tier," which ones are "mid," and which ones are apparently one bad semester away from losing their charter. I didn't make the rules. I just lived inside them for four years.
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