Orientation at the College of William and Mary was one of the best weeks of my life. Simultaneously, it was incredibly stressful. Did I want to join a club sport? What extracurriculars did I want to do? What classes was I going to sign up for? What were my backup classes? At the very least, I thought I knew that I did not want to participate in Greek life on campus. But after I ended up going to “Meet the Greeks,” I was surprisingly torn. My grandmother had been in a sorority and highly recommended it, and everyone I had met who was in sorority seemed to love their experience.
“Maybe I would try this sorority thing out,” I thought to myself. However, as I looked into signing up for recruitment, I realized that it was all happening the first and second weekends of classes. I was going to a football game, a family wedding and celebrating my birthday within the first few weeks of school, all while trying to figure out how to take college classes. I was already so overwhelmed that I decided to wait a year to participate in recruitment. I am looking forward to going through the recruitment process in the upcoming fall and joining a sorority, but I wish that the College had full spring recruitment instead of our current complete fall recruitment and partial spring recruitment.
Other schools, like the University of Virginia, have all sorority recruitment take place in the spring. Freshmen still get an opportunity to make Greek life a part of their first year, but they also have time to get to know both themselves at college and the differences between sororities. Some of my friends here have dropped out of Greek life because they joined the wrong sorority for them, due to the fact that they had so little time before recruitment.
I know that I personally have changed a great deal from the person I was in high school, and I think that it was important for me to take the time to get to know myself in college before I made a lifelong commitment to a sorority. However, I would have loved nothing more than to go through recruitment this semester and have had the chance to be in a sorority my freshman year. While it is true that, occasionally, a few sororities have spring recruitment, that does not really compare to the full fall recruitment that occurs here. Personally, the sororities that I am considering joining did not have spring recruitment, so I have to wait until this upcoming fall to participate in recruitment.
While waiting a year to join is not the end of the world, I do feel like I have missed out by not participating in Greek life my freshman year. Though it gives me no joy to praise UVA for anything, I think that in this one small area, they and other colleges that do spring recruitment have the edge on us.
Email Anna Boustany at aeboustany@email.wm.edu