Indiana University Recruitment 2024
 

I didn't expect to start the first recruitment thread of the year so soon, but Indiana recruitment is here! Here is the schedule:

Open Invite- January 4th-5th (All 22 chapters are visited)
Philanthropy and Service Round- January 6th-7th (max of 16 parties)
Sisterhood Round- January 12-13 (max of 9 parties)
Preference Round- January 14th (max of 2 parties)
Bid Night- January 17th!!!

I'd like to wish everyone involved or going through good luck and may this be a successful recruitment!!

Yikes. I can't imagine having a full schedule at sisterhood and then having to pick just 2 out of 9 to rank as your first choices for pref. Why not 3?

Good luck to all the PNMs and chapters.

It makes sense to me to go down to two. All parties involved have had a chance to meet/mix/know one another during the entire first semester. Why drag out the process if houses/pnms have the idea they know where their hearts are?

Our neighbor girl pledged Theta at IU last year and just went back two days ago to prepare for recruitment. From listening to her, VERY few PNM’s had 9 left at Sisterhood—many had only 3 or 4, some only 2—so perhaps ranking 2 is not that difficult for many.

NPC believes, with RFM, that by preference, PNMs have two solid choices from which to make their decision to join. In many cases, when PNMs had three choices, they were just visiting a chapter that they weren't interested in anyway. By forcing the chapters to cut to this level and PNMs as well, PNMs have two choices and women aren't "led on" by chapters inviting too many back knowing they can't take that many women based off the expected quota range. RFM now pretty much has set that women only attend two pref events at most schools.

^^^ This. I remember reading that NPC research indicated that PNMs tended to be more disappointed if they had 3 invitations and matched to their third choice, compared to second choice out of two. Is any school still doing a max of 3 invitations for pref, or is everyone down to 2 max?

Hmm, that makes sense. I went through recruitment long before RFM was a thing, and there were only 4 NPCs and a local at my school - a much different system.

From all the things I've seen and heard, nobody has 3 pref parties anymore.

Oh man. My previous uni before transferring had 3 pref parties, but there was only 1 national on campus. None of the typical NPC rules applied.

Would this also be hard for the weaker recruiting chapters? If you invited most of the PNMs back for the round of 9, do you invite most of them to pref, too? Seems like it would be very difficult to assess who is interested.

With the way RFM works, weaker recruiting chapters will invite more women back than strong recruiters. The goal is to have enough women return so that they have a chance to make quota at the end based on historical data. Stronger recruiters will have bigger cuts to make as to not "lead on" PNMs in thinking they have a shot at a bid at a house.

You also have to remember that some women are going to drop out completely anyway the second they don't have the one or two houses left that they want because they refuse to even consider another option. If I had to guess, 90% of PNMs get placed here, and the ones that don't aren't all dropped - they drop out.

Here are last year's recruitment statistics, if you're interested. (Note: These stats are or formal recruitment only. Several chapters participated in informal recruitment, but those numbers are not included here.)

Does Alpha Sigma Alpha participate in formal recruitment? I remember they used to. Did they become a chapter that only does informal/COB?

Have I missed it, or do we know how many young women began the current 2024 IU recruitment process?

I notice that IU posts recruitment stats after recruitment wraps up, so we'll probably get numbers in the future.

ASA only participated in Open House Round both last year and this year.

Bid Night is tonight. I don’t know what time it starts/started.

I remember a while back they did the rho gamma reveal on instagram live, and then the bids were opened.

In the midst of tik tok activity, there were a decent amount of people dropping out of recruitment, and similar to when Bama recruitment was all the buzz, alumni/advisors/consultants were explaining everything in a much more logistical manner. I don't wanna imagine a world where social media was huge when bed rush was still a thing at IU.

Go look at some of the older IU Recruitment threads on here. There were some massive trainwrecks!

I did see the rush experience of someone who went through and made it back in the 96. I did see some thread recommendations at the bottom of this, might take a look at them.

So I checked instagram and 1,500 bids have been given out. PNMs should be opening their bids up soon.

I only come to GC around IU recruitment time but maybe one of these days I'll share my story from 2006. Bed rush was so brutal and gross. There were dozens or maybe even hundreds of girls who went to 3 preference parties and ended up with no bid. I remember the sweetest girl on my floor freshman year who was "cross-cut". It was unfair to Rho Gammas as well having to console multiple heartbroken PNMs. I didn't even understand that this was NOT the normal process for years. Now when I hear on TikTok "dropped from all" they mean "dropped from all of my favorites" and I just get so angry.

In any event, hoping for good outcomes for everyone!

Phi Mu
 

79 new Phi's posted on an Instagram story

That's what I sensed when I'd watch these videos of PNMs saying "I dropped." And I doubt it was a matter of grades or a genuine reputation issue, which is super rare. I did hear that it was extremely cold the whole week (like much of the midwest, real feels were in the negatives :eek:)

Per IU Panhellenic's Instagram post, around 1,500 women accepted bids this year.

Recruitment at this time of year must be brutal! Someone tried to convince me to go to a winter festival this week…yeah, it wasn’t really happening. It’s one thing to ski or hike when it’s cold and you’re dressed for it, but to try to socialize or move between events and look nice when it’s really, really cold and snowing and slushy is just not a good time.

I have joked that schools in the north should do fall recruitment and southern should do winter because the temps are much for favorable for each season. I know Indy gets cold this time of year but nobody expected this!

I’m forever traumatized by the story with the PNM who broke her back during recruitment (in upstate NY) during a blizzard! It was so bad the school’s health center was closed because of the emergency.

(She got a bid and was okay. Just sore.)

Ah good it ended well for her but good lord! :eek: Cornell is just starting and other schools like Syracuse and Binghamton are going to have recruitment soon. I couldn't imagine traversing the brutal upstate winters with a nice outfit on like that, though I've sene PNMs essentially have full winter get ups then remove everything to reveal their actual outfits.

Since we’re on IU Recruitment, I’m going to throw this in since it does touch on several bases. E. Jean Carroll, the noted journalist and author who’s now in the news over her lawsuits against Donald Trump, was not only a Pi Beta Phi at IU, but she was Miss Indiana University and an IU cheerleader, eventually winning the Miss Cheerleader USA award in the early/mid 1960’s.

I’m cheering her on to kick Trump’s ass!

And her story was copied from an episode of Law and Order: SVU.

IU used to do first round of recruitment in October and all the rest the week before second semester classes started in January.

Yeah, I remember that. That would be really frustrating, to have to wait that long to see who invited you back.

I feel like I’ve discussed this book here before, but maybe not? https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674088023

The sociologists who wrote the book didn’t come right out and say it was IU…but they mentioned that weird detail about their recruitment being split like that, so people were able to figure it out pretty quickly lol…

It’s an excellent book- more focused on how financial resources affect college outcomes but it does touch on Greek life and how it sets the social scene for a lot of people at schools like IU.

You did...and thanks to you, I bought a copy. : )

Based on the description of the dorm they stayed in, I'm almost positive that it's McNutt, where I lived freshman and sophomore year at IU.

I do recall when Pledged came out people were speculating was school it was. I'm not sure but IU and SMU were the top contenders.

If memory serves, someone here on GreekChat read Pledged and thought it's unnamed school sounded like theirs, the University of Maryland.

That book always read like a mix of fiction and non-fiction, likely to keep people interested as it read like a written soap opera story.

Robbins definitely wrote about IU. She was at the Journalism School several different times a year or so before the book was published sitting in on classes, talking to students. She used the guise of her being a journalist, she wanted to see what the school had to offer and wanted to "mentor" female journalists. At least one of the women "featured" in the book was a journalism major she "interviewed" for an "internship". This information was relayed to me by a person who was teaching there in the j-school at the time Robbins was finishing up the book and the person put two and two together after the book was published.

Interesting!

I was reading another book:

https://uncpress.org/book/9781469672...ts-of-friends/

And in this one, the author just randomly mentions that Pledged is about SMU- as if everyone knows this. I found that to be rather strange, as I’ve never heard anyone come out and say the school she went “undercover” at had been outed. But it’s in there, like it’s a proven fact…

Otherwise, it’s a pretty decent book.

How many weeks after Formal Recruitment will this year's stats be available?

I recall it came out a month or so later. It'll certainly be posted in here when they do come out.