Greek life is a part of what makes ETSU so great for many of our students, and Greek life just added many new members during Panhellenic sorority recruitment this past week.
National Panhellenic Conference holds many numbers of sororities in the nation. To add new members to the organizations, sororities have formal recruitment every fall semester, and this semester marks Alpha Omicron Pi’s first ever formal recruitment, as well as new Director of Greek Life Maggie Darden’s.
Sorority recruitment is where every woman interested in Greek life gets to meet women from each sorority and find the one that is the best fit for them. In the end, they ultimately run home to the sorority of their choice on bid day. It is also an opportunity for each sorority to determine which women will be a good fit for their individual chapters.
Sorority recruitment kicked off Thursday, Sept. 14 and ended with bid day on Sunday, Sept. 17. The schedule was as follows: Thursday night was philanthropy night; Friday was sisterhood night; Saturday was preference night and Sunday was bid day.
Alpha Omicron Pi colonized last fall, but President Rená Baker says recruitment this fall with the rest of the sororities has been a completely different experience in comparison to what they did as a colony.
“When we were colonized, we had women from headquarters come down and basically give us the same experience, but this new member class was special because our very own officers planned and organized it,” Baker said. “This was an entirely different experience for us, simply because we are the ones recruiting.”
Alpha Omicron Pi was prepared for recruitment this fall.
“Our plan was just to make people feel as comfortable as possible,” Baker said. “We pulled ideas from different AOπ chapters and just went in with the mindset that we would be successful. We couldn’t have done it without our headquarters staff, amazing advisers and our wonderful Vice President of Membership Recruitment. These ladies worked so hard to get us where we are.”
New Director of Greek Life Maggie Darden said ETSU can continue to expect more fraternity chapter additions in the near future, but Alpha Omicron Pi might be the newest Panhellenic sorority on campus for the time being.
“Fraternities have an expansion plan that they voted on last year… The plan outlines adding one fraternity per year. There are steps they have to go through in order to become a fraternity on campus, one of them including a presentation to the Inter-Fraternity Council,” Darden said. “We haven’t had anyone set up a meeting this fall, but that will probably happen later this semester or next spring.”
“We don’t have the trend to add two sororities closely together, so we don’t have plans to add another Panhellenic sorority in the near future until our community stabilizes a bit more,” Darden said.
Darden also hopes to add more organizations to the National Pan-Hellenic Council.
“I would love to see more organizations of NPHC join our community and add to the diversity of our community,” she said.
