By Carly Berndt, For The Miami Student
Before I begin, I would like to preface the next 600 words or so by saying that this article is not intended to trash-talk Greek life or the people involved in it. If I truly wanted to trash-talk Greek life, GDI life or any other group of people involved in life, I have no doubts I could figure it out.
I know, that's a really reassuring and totally emotionally stable sounding way to start off an article in the middle of a newspaper, isn't it?
Sometime around the second week of J-Term, every one of my 983 Facebook friends who were already involved in Miami's Greek system changed some aspect of their profile (usually their cover photo, but some went the whole 9 yards and used their profile picture) to read "Rush/Go XYZ sorority."
I get this to some extent. The whole point of recruitment is to actually recruit people, which is a pretty vital component of having a functioning sorority (or any other Greek organization).
That being said, as someone who very recently dropped out of rush, I will say the idea that "Potential New Members," or "PNMs," have control over the rush process and where they do/don't end up is less of a practice and more of an illusion.
One of the hardest hitting realities for me-and a lot of other girls-is rooted in the "Recruitment Bill of Rights." Essentially, the girls rushing and the girls recruiting have to be nice to each other; no hair pulling, name calling, Mean Girls style cafeteria brawls, or any of that classy stuff.
In the short run, this is a pretty solid practice. I can't think of a situation more awkward than sitting on some dusty linoleum floor, picking at your cuticles quietly until the next girl in the same matching T-shirt came along to chat, because neither of you had to pretend you liked each other.
But then, when you really start to think about what that means in the long run, you realize how that, for lack of a better term, sucks.
In order to avoid the potential 5 minutes of awkward small talk or counting the tiles on the ceiling, every conversation gets treated like it's the best conversation anyone has ever had, and odds are that isn't really the case.
So what happens next is you leave every round the first couple of days thinking that everything went great, amazed at how nervous you and all your friends were because you feel like you rocked every single conversation. You begin to wonder if you can get bids to more than one house, and when your friends tells you that's impossible, you start to wonder if they'll make an exception for you because you're that great.
And then you get cut by most of the houses where you thought everything went great, and you have no idea why. And when your friend, who had nearly the exact same conversations with the exact same houses doesn't get cut, you really have no idea why.
This is where the illusion of control comes into play. Since each conversation has to at least appear to go well, the foolish idea that each conversation actually did go well becomes the only idea you have for at least 24 hours. You think you know what you're doing and you think that you control the situation, only to find out that the only thing you really control is yourself, and sometimes, you find out that being yourself isn't necessarily enough.
I'm not trying to say that every women involved in the Greek community or in the recruitment process is some Medusa hybrid whose only goal is to suffocate the self confidence of 18 year old girls. I have friends involved in Greek life, and I know that is not the case. However, I do think the conversation as to whether or not treating everyone fairly is actually fair is a conversation worth having.