Disclaimer: I post under another name, but wanted to share my rush story with a different name since I’ve written about my college experience before and didn’t want to spoil the story ahead of time.
I attended a large Midwestern university and lived at home while going to school. My best friend from high school also attended the same university, but lived on campus. I was the first woman in my family on either side to graduate from college and, consequently, had no Greek background at all. Going Greek was not a big focus at my high school either so I knew basically nothing.
Each summer all freshmen women received in the mail a large, thick sorority rush booklet with information about each chapter, rush phases, etc. There were sixteen sororities at that time and the Greek system was very visible and active on campus. I spent lots of time looking through the booklet, very interested in Greek life. I mentioned it to my friend, but she had no interest in rushing. Even though I was a leader in both academics and extracurriculars in high school, I am also an introvert who does not enjoy making small talk at large social gatherings and in the end did not have the courage to try rush alone. So I never signed up even though I was very interested.
My freshman year I met a few Greeks in classes. I got to know one fraternity guy in my foreign language class who was drop dead handsome and a member of one of the top fraternities on campus. He was a great, friendly ambassador for the Greek system and he encouraged me to rush. I also met a sorority member through an honors organization we were both in. She was a member of a top sorority on campus with a reputation for having a gorgeous home and smart, classy girls. She, too, encouraged me to consider rushing in the fall. Several of the women on my friend’s dorm floor pledged and I interacted with them in a limited way while spending time visiting my friend. But, in all honesty, the more Greeks I met and observed on campus, the more I felt like I probably wouldn’t fit in even though I still found the whole Greek thing incredibly appealing.
It amazes me how the course of a person’s life can change through the most seemingly trivial action. In my case in came about through picking up a business card while shopping at a mall out of town. The spring of my freshman year, I picked up a business card in a favorite store and discovered that they would be opening a location in my city that summer. I had been working at my previous job for a few years and was ready to do something different. This store was right up my alley so I started regularly calling the mall for the contact information. I applied to the store and was hired in August. I didn’t know it at the time, but working there would be the catalyst to start me on the road to finally finding my Greek home.
