With Bid Day and the end of the potential new member process for Greek organizations last month, a new wave of students have completed the recruitment process, from mandatories to open rounds to invite rounds.

This process, especially for fraternities, happens very quickly. The PNM process for fraternities lasted only seven days this year. It included one round of mandatories, two open rounds and two invite rounds before Bid Day. For sororities, it was split among four rounds over the course of two weeks.

This schedule is jam-packed and creates lots of havoc when things move so fast. For fraternity mandatory rounds, PNMs only spend 20 minutes at each house before moving onto the next. From personal experience, many of these conversations were boring and surface level. I wasn’t able to get a sense of anything at a given house; they all just blended together. Similarly, PNMs only had three hours during each of the two open rounds to decide where they wanted to spend their time. For me, it was confusing trying to decide where to go. I doubted that I could make a good enough impression to get invited back after only spending an hour there.

At the spring recruitment kickoff, the Interfraternity Council stated in a Zoom call to kick off recruitment, that this semester it had the most PNMs since 2018. This resulted in highly crowded houses during the recruitment process. Especially during mandatories, there were at least two PNMs for every fraternity member, with some houses being even more stretched thin. How am I supposed to get a sense of whether or not I like the fraternity if I only get the chance to talk to one or two people before being shuffled onto the next house? How can fraternity members get a sense of PNMs when they’re forced to talk to multiple people at once, and only for short periods of time?

Freshman Adam Goodman went through the fraternity recruitment process and found similar frustrations. He felt disillusioned with the process as a whole, he said.

“I hated the milling around and waiting for brothers to free up just so you could have some surface level conversation with them,” Goodman said. “I didn’t really feel like I got to know anybody that well.”

For fraternities, the process must be expanded in time. Both the Greek organizations and the PNMs need more time to get to know each other. There should be more mandatory rounds, spread over a period of two weeks instead of one. That would both allow more engaging conversations to happen and give PNMs a better idea of where they want to focus on during open rounds instead of having to go off so little.

On the other hand, sorority recruitment occurred shortly after the spring semester started. Although the process as a whole lasted longer than fraternities, many of the meetings for PNMs were jam-packed on the weekends, leaving little time for studying and relaxing.

Freshman Ashley Corso went through the sorority recruitment process and found herself overwhelmed with her new responsibilities.

“The most stressful part of rushing was that it was the week after we started a new semester,” Corso said. “So not only are you throwing yourself into a whole new set of people, but a new set of new classes with new professors. You’re trying to balance school with a social life, which can be really hard.”

In order to mediate this crammed schedule, sorority recruitment should not only start later, but be split up across the week. This way, PNMs can take real breaks and not have to jump on a Zoom call with a different sorority every 20 minutes. It would also help to reduce anxiety, as PNMs can spend more time balancing their other responsibilities.

A common problem I found in my experience as a PNM was that fraternities just blended together at a certain point. When you walk into similar houses and have similar conversations, nothing sticks out. To fix this, mandatory rounds for both fraternities and sororities should be spread out over the course of a few days, instead of having to meet everyone all on one day. It allows both PNMs and Greek organizations to digest the conversations they had and make decisions on who they did or didn’t like.

Overall, the process as it stands now is too crammed. The entire point of the process is for people to get to know each other, which it fails to do past the surface level. The simple fix of making it longer will vastly improve communication, stress and impressions of both fraternities and sororities.

John Hepp is a freshman sports analytics major. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at jwhepp@syr.edu.

Published on March 2, 2022 at 11:33 pm