aphi rush pdf?

Time to bump this!

—Greek Life relieves us of that daunting adjustment. As young American women go through sorority rush, meet girls, and build connections, we search for comfort, and we trust the girls whom we like to get along with other girls we will like. We count on them to select a pledge class of sixty-something like-minded individuals who might give us the security that we are so searching for. In a few short weeks, sixty of the 7,000 are cherry-picked for us, and we are hopeful that some of them will become our best friends in this community that innately demands a strong sense of “sisterhood.” This unfamiliar place might start to feel like a second home sooner than we can imagine. It’s enticing, isn’t it?
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And, for some, that temptation is defined by more than that wish for solace and belonging. Sororities recruit similar individuals, and, with that, they gain collective reputations that are then highlighted in red and planted on the foreheads of the individuals who join them. Like any system, there is a hierarchy in those reputations, and we are thus placed us on a level that can help define our feelings about our social worth in the eyes of ourselves and others. Being favorably recognized as a member of a "top" house can make us feel socially regarded as elite or important, and that recognition as part of something good or bad can make us feel good or bad for no good reason at all.​
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_______ was a senior in Beta Delta when I was a freshman. In a sorority of over 200 girls, it takes commitment and interest—that most of us, frankly, cannot be bothered with—to get to know every sister on a personal level. As a freshman, I knew everyone in my own pledge class and most of the girls in the pledge class above me, but, as a busy student, connecting with over 200 girls exceeded my social priority. I would guess that I knew, or at least knew of, a combined total of about forty juniors and seniors in Beta Delta. I would have walked right past _________ on the street.
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I did, however, recognize her name, and I had a positive sentiment towards Katie. She was a sister of my chapter, and, therefore, I could trust that I should feel connected to her in some small way. After all, she and her friends recruited the juniors, who recruited the sophomores, who recruited my friends and me.

It wasn’t until my junior year, however, two years after “senior member” had graduated, that I was forced to connect with her on a personal level. She had reached out to the other recruitment chairs of Beta Delta and me to enthusiastically recommend a freshman at the University of Michigan to our chapter: her younger sister. We offered immense gratitude and excitement that _______—and two other members of her pledge class, including a former chapter president—had contacted us about the freshman sister, and we assured them that she would have an especially wonderful experience while rushing Beta Delta.

As a national organization that was founded with values including sisterhood, leadership, loyalty, and character development, it is assumed that those values should be reflected in our recruiting process. We spend weeks planning for recruitment parties to ensure that every young woman going through recruitment at Beta Delta feels important and desired. We know that girls come to us seeking security and development during an unsettling time, and we exist to give them just that. We honor tradition. We honor legacy. We expect that we will always help a fellow sister, and we will always want the best for all sisters of Beta Delta. We care for and look out for each other—especially for those at our own University of Michigan Chapter of Beta Delta.
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We received three letters from girls whom we knew that recommended the pnm to Beta Delta. Her legacy status as an in-house-biological-sister was noted on her recruitment profile and well-ingrained into the brains of the recruitment team at the University of Michigan. However, despite this knowledge, despite her sister’s contribution to our sisterhood, and despite the fact that these recommendations for a legacy came from the very girls whom we trusted to find us our own sisters—and thus lead us to the college experience that would bring us so much joy as to inspire us to direct the recruitment process—The pnm was not invited back to the third or final rounds of recruitment parties at Beta Delta. And she didn’t just slip through the cracks.
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So, why would we ever intentionally drop her? Why would we betray a sister for no reason at all? Why would our advisor from Beta Delta’s national organization allow us—or even instruct us—to do so?

During my sophomore year, the recruitment chairs of Beta Delta took themselves quite seriously in a way that I found both laughable and unsurprising as they told us that we had been scored, and that we would need to score girls, on a 1-10 scale of "how well the PNM fits into Beta Delta," 1 being the lowest, 10 being the highest.

They said that this process of "Chapter Scoring" was confidential because it was prohibited by to Panhellenic bylaws, but they assured us that everybody did it. How else were all of the houses expected to keep track of so many girls? They explained it to us as necessary in helping each PNM find her home, and it was not meant to be malicious. Besides, it was the process that had connected us to a community of similar girls and had brought every single one of us to our closest friends.

As soon as PNMs left the Beta Delta house, the sisters would score us on that 1-10 scale, recap our conversation, and write down the name of a sister whom we were similar to in order to ensure that we would all meet like-minded individuals and have the best recruitment experience possible. It wasn’t all that personally upsetting for us to hear because we all knew that we must have been high on the “how well does she fit in” scale, and that shared, comfortable energy allowed us to feel alright about the fact that we, too, would have to score girls. The scoring process ensured that no one would slip through the cracks, recruitment would run efficiently, and everyone would end up in the best-fit chapter for them. The recruitment chairs assured us that it wasn’t evil—it was essential.
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But, they chose their words carefully. The recruitment chairs constantly reminded us that no one gets a score of “zero,” because every girl going through recruitment would fit in on some level. They drilled it into our heads, over and over again, that we were scoring girls on how much they reminded us of our current sisters rather than valuing them on our perceived quality of their individual character. It wasn’t offensive because giving a girl a score of 4/10 wasn’t declaring that she was a 4/10 individual, it was only suggesting that she would get along better with girls in a different chapter of our community.
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Each year, during the Spring semester, Beta Delta's recruitment chairs send an email to the sophomore pledge class that includes a sign up sheet for "Coffee Dates" with the intention of getting the girls excited about recruiting a new pledge class in the Fall. The rush chairs tell the sophomores that they want to meet with them in small groups for about fifteen minutes just to learn more about their experiences with recruitment, how much they enjoyed the process, and, of course, what things they especially liked about Beta Delta's recruitment process or what other houses did better than we did.
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They begin each "Coffee Date" by telling the sisters that everything we discuss there, and all recruitment discussions going forward, must remain confidential within the sisters of Beta Delta.
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As a sophomore, I nodded compliantly. The rush chairs were stern in their demands, and so we let them set the serious yet excited tone to gossip about all things recruitment. They encouraged us to talk about our personal experiences with recruitment and to join in enthusiastically in agreement or disagreement with each other. Their curious eyes lit up as we told them of Zeta Beta Gamma's truffle desserts and Pi Mu's heart-wrenching philanthropy presentation. Their fingers typed furiously as they sat opposite us.
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They whispered through their smiles as we walked away.​
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A year later, it was my turn. And, like everything else, the Coffee Dates were lies and disguises.
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The smiling former recruitment chairs finally let the four of us hear the whispers. They told us of the national policies that we would need to follow in order to be the most desirable chapter on campus. They told us that the superficial scoring—the messed up way in which we determined the value of potential sisters—didn't end upon membership; it just changed.

They told us that we would need to rank the current sisters of Beta Delta on a scale of 1-10 in order to determine their "recruiting strength." 30% of that score would be determined by how personable and outgoing they were and how positive they seemed about the recruitment process in general. 70% percent of that score would be their External Score.
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They were all sisters, and their External Prescores had once been high enough to grant them membership. Their seven-and-above External Scores, however, had been relative to 1,200 PNMs. Now, we would need to score them relative to each other, and they couldn't all be scored highly—they couldn't all be equally worthy of meeting our most desirable recruits. So, we looked at our friends and sisters and belittled their worth into only numbers.
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The Coffee Dates were only a discrete way to ask the vicious questions.
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How much did you enjoy talking to girls while you were going through recruitment?​
How much will girls enjoy talking to you during recruitment?
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What other house would you have done if you hadn't done Beta Delta?
Did other "top" houses want you? In other words, did you "rush well"?
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Whispering smiles
What's her External Score relative to the rest of the chapter?

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These were girls I would enjoy these four years with. These were girls I would maybe one day ask for career advice or professional help. These were girls I would be connected to forever. These were some of my closest friends. Who was I to label them with numbers—numbers that would represent how pretty and how personable I thought they were that would thus define how well I thought they would be able to recruit new members into our "sisterhood"?
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Who was I?

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The PNM threes were gone before they walked inside, and the Beta Delta threes were used to entertain them for those twenty-five minutes before we could right click on their cell in the External Prescoring document and press delete.
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The next step was to form the sisters into "bump groups," or groups of girls who would meet the same PNMs and make decisions about them. All of the houses did it, and there was no shame in doing so. After all, everyone wanted to ensure that PNMs got a true feel for each house, and they wouldn't be able to do so after meeting only one sister. At Beta Delta, we told the girls that we grouped them in the way that we did in order to show PNMs that there was no "typical Beta Delta girl," and we were made up of young women from all different backgrounds and with varied interests.
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And that's exactly what we did: we ensured that the girls in each bump group were "different" from each other.
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We ensured that each bump group had a mix of girls from Florida and California and Chicago rather than having a bump group of girls who were all from Michigan. We ensured that each bump group had some louder girls who were fully of personality and also some more laid-back, easygoing girls. We ensured that each bump group had an even ratio of blondes to brunettes.
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But among these "unique differences," there was one way that the girls in each bump group, without question, were exactly the same.
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Bump Group 1 would include only sisters who were scored as nines and tens. Bump Group 14 would include only sisters who were scored as ones and twos.
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And it didn't end there.
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There was more organizing to be done in order to avoid the chaos that is 1,200 girls coming in and out of a sorority house for twenty-five-minute conversations in a span of eight hours. The sisters understood that the literal moving parts of this process had to be systematic as well. Specifically, each bump group would have a predetermined seat in an assigned area of the house so that the sisters and their PNMs would not have to run around in circles looking for an open place to chat. It made methodical sense, just as everything else did.
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Bump groups 10-14 and their PNMs would sit on the hardwood chairs in the brown, empty dining room. Bump groups 4-9 would sit on the beige rugs and couches in the light, yellow living room.
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Bump groups 1-3 would get comfortable on the couches in the smaller extra living room. The idea was that, in this enclosed space, PNMs would look around at the room full of pretty Beta Delta girls, and the pretty PNMs whom they were rushing, and admire these girls who might all become their sisters.

The chaos that we worked so hard to control fiercely returned during the ten-minute scoring break between each round. The Living Room Girls would whisper-shout about girls they wanted as their "little sisters," and the Dining Room Girls would stare enviously and whine about how they hadn't met anyone "good" yet. It didn't take more than a few rounds for the Dining Room Girls to figure out that they had not met and might not meet a single girl who "reminded them of their current sisters."
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It didn't take more than a few rounds for them to figure out that no one whom they would speak to would be invited back to the next round.
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They noticed that if and when they did have the opportunity to recruit girls who might become sisters of Beta Delta, it was only when the lines got messed up, and they picked up the wrong girl.

Part 6
FLAGGING
LET'S JUST DOUBLE CHECK.
You thought it ended there, didn't you?
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It couldn't possibly get any more calculated or ridiculous or laughably shallow. But it can. It always can.
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That brings me to "Flagging." Yes—another dumb name for another dumb process. Another euphemism. Like "Coffee Dates." Or "External Score."
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Or "Does she remind you of your current sisters?"

We were taught to think of Flagging as "double checking."
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It worked both ways. Sometimes, girls looked better in person than they did online, and we needed to take notes to ensure that those girls were "saved" and rushed "harder" in rounds going forward. Flagging was our way of saving the pretty girls from the dining room and ensuring that everyone in the living room was worthy of being there.
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"Saving" the "worthy" PNMs wasn't always as simple as bumping a star's External Score up to where it belonged and vowing to rush her like the queen that her appearance suggested that she was.
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The matching process failed us one or two out of every five recruitment parties. We could never figure out why it was so difficult for the sisters to know their correct places in the lines and meet the right girl.
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But that's when it became our responsibility to "save" the "good" PNMs from the detrimental experience that would be ending up with the wrong sister in the dining room.
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As the recruitment team, we had to ensure that the star PNMs would have the best recruitment experience possible. They had to meet our strongest recruiters, and as the rush team, it was our responsibility to meet all star PNMs and make final decisions about them. If a star had been picked up by the wrong sister, it was especially important that we invade their conversation, force our "favorable" energy into what was thought to be an unfavorable situation, and avert the "crisis" that was a four recruiting a nine.
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Sisters were often flattered when we wanted to come and join their conversations. Very few actually realized how incredibly offensive it often was.

Flagging was a little easier to deal with because I wasn't the one doing it; this one was entirely in the hands of nationals.

But that's mostly because they didn't trust us and feared that our moral judgment could allow us to manipulate this part of the process. Rightfully so.
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This was the once place where nationals could catch us if we had discreetly changed a PNM's Prescore in the Google Doc because we had heard great things about her and wanted to push her through even though she was thought to be externally unworthy of an invitation.
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And that's just what we did, and nationals definitely caught it.
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___________was on Michigan's women's soccer team. Two of her closest friends from high school had joined Beta Delta during their freshman year at Michigan, but _________ hadn't yet rushed because she wasn’t sure if it would work with her athletic schedule. Because of her high school friends, however, _________ quickly found a community within Beta Delta, and she was "socially" considered a sister by many of the girls. She even decided to rush sophomore year solely for the purpose of officially joining Beta Delta, and her twenty close friends in the chapter would make sure that it would happen for her. In the Prescoring Google Doc, we easily made her External Score a seven so that we, too, could make sure that it would happen for her.
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But Our Advisor flagged her as a "Must Go."
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We told Our advisor that we had no choice. If we dropped _________, the sophomores would know that we were manipulating the Chapter Scores behind closed doors, and they would revolt against us and tear us apart. The motives of Beta Delta would be called into question, and the sisterhood would collapse. ________ was friendly with everyone in their pledge class, and her chapter scores were tens across the board. Everyone knew that.
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As if our advisor didn't already have enough power, she had the laptop with the national software that made all the final decisions about potential recruits. And despite ______’s manipulated External Prescore, Our Advisor insisted that we couldn't give her a bid because her true External Score was "more like a four."
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We fought back, insisting that it would become a national problem if she were dropped, and we promised that we would only try to override the policy about External Scoring just this once.
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And we won that battle. We finally had the courage to fight back against the superficial corruption that tried to control us, and we made it happen.
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But we only fought for this one because dropping her would have been too great of a risk, and we had to give her a bid in order to save face with the chapter and prevent another uproar.