What a Sorority Rush

They say every girl cries at least once during rush.

So although you may not wonder why approximately 400 freshmen women sign up every year for the Panhellenic Council's formal recruitment process--to join one of the ten Panhel sororities on campus--obvi-you have to wonder if they know what they're getting themselves into.

This year, as in years previous, about a hundred girls dropped out before making it to Bid Day--the mecca of recruitment. The freshmen who stick it out are assured that after a week of uncertainty, they'll be greeted with slogan-bearing T-shirts, personalized gifts, an abundance of cheering and clapping and some brand new sisters.

What they don't know is whether they'll feel like they're in the right place, or whether they'll be smiling for the camera but looking across the quad wishing they were in some other best damn pledge class.

"I understand that it's an entirely superficial, vapid process," Jenny says on a Friday afternoon, a few hours before the first round of rush starts. "You know you go in, and they're going to assess how attractive you are, and how expensive your clothing is, and what kind of socioeconomic background you come from. And those are the categories they use to decide whether or not you're going to fit in with them."

Given her attitude, Jenny's decision to go through rush seems puzzling. When the brunette from California first arrived at Duke, joining a sorority wasn't something that had crossed her mind. But she wasn't satisfied with the social scene she experienced as a first-semester freshman-cramped (sweaty) section parties filled with people (other freshmen) looking for free beer. Before turning to more drastic measures like transferring, Jenny opted to give rush a try, and she clearly has doubts about putting herself through the process.

"I think that I've given the impression that I don't care, and I don't care about the social status that comes with these stupid little greek letters," she says. "What I'd really like is to find girls that I like their company, and I get along with them, and I can make lots of friends. That's what I would like.

"At the same time, of course it would be nice to be validated and be like, 'Really? You think I'm pretty enough to be a TriDelt?' How flattering, right?"

Anna, a North Carolina native, was influenced by friends who attend public universities where rush traditionally takes place first semester and joining a sorority means gaining dozens of instant housemates. She initially didn't think she would go greek at Duke, but when most of her hallmates signed up for rush, she joined in. Her best friend is in a sorority at UNC, and she hopes that Duke's rush will be little bit different, a little less intense.

"I kind of expect to find a group of girls that I could have something in common with and be really good friends with," Anna says.

All the girls are aware of the various stereotypes surrounding sororities, largely gleaned from upperclassmen. They are mostly negative, mostly about Kappa, Pi Phi, Theta and TriDelt: the "Core Four." Rumors about personalities, partying habits and drug use have trickled over to East Campus.

"Rush is overwhelming," Kate declares before the process starts. "If you're not in the Core Four, are you even a presence on campus? That's a common fear. On the surface that seems ridiculous to me. At the same time, maybe it's true."

Emma is a bubbly freshman from Pennsylvania whose laissez-faire attitude sets her apart from the others. Although rushing was something she'd always thought about doing in college, she confesses to having "zero exposure" to sororities first semester.

"Rush is the only way to get into a sorority, and it's really not that important to me to be in one, but I don't want to have not rushed and really wish that I'd done it," she says. "Even if I don't end up pledging one, it'll be nice to know what the sororities are, because people talk about them, and I would like to place significance to that."

But her limited knowledge of the individual sororities themselves doesn't mean she lacks expectations heading into the two-week process.

"I imagine that they're going to be judging my clothes. You can't help but judge people based on their clothes-I'm going to do it. It's nice to pretend that people don't judge books by their cover, but it's something you have to do because it definitely gives you a perception of what the person's like," says Emma. "I want to meet people like me. If I don't find a sorority that I don't think I really fit into, I would prefer not to just settle for one.

"I would say I'm not excited or hesitant, I'm just kind of like whatever. Like, I'm wearing this," she says pointing to her casual skirt and long-sleeve shirt combination. "I've worn it all day. I don't really care."

She shrugs and goes to make her nametag, two hours before the first round starts.

For the most part, the four girls were pleasantly surprised by Round One of rush, although they said the repetitive conversations reflected the awkward nature of having to make the same small talk over and over: So, where are you from? What dorm do you live in? How was your break? Ohmygod, I love your headband.

"It was a lot better than I thought it was going to be," Kate says. "I feel like I had the same conversation with every girl, which I guess made sense because you don't know anyone."

But behind the chitchat, each of them was acutely aware of being evaluated.

"People definitely look you in the eye, but that's because there are, like, 50 other people in the room that can look you up and down," Jenny says.

"A couple of the sororities, they would break eye contact to maybe look at what I was wearing, which I thought was rude," says Kate. "There was one eye on me and one eye on the room."

Conversely, the freshmen were also making snap judgments about each of the sororities. For the second round, they would only be going back to a maximum of seven sororities, and each had to decide on her bottom three.

"Oh yeah, I definitely have an opinion on every one," says the I-can't-even-name-the-Core-Four Emma, just a day into rush. "I can rank them on a scale of one to ten."

She recounted a story about being in the bathroom with a few girls in her rush group who liked Pi Phi and Kappa but said, 'Chi-O was so boring, I couldn't talk about anything with any of them.' When the girls turned to Emma for her opinion, she told them she liked Chi-O the best out of the three, creating an uncomfortable silence.

"I just thought those girls were humbler," she says. "I'm not about orange skin and dyed blonde hair, and a lot of girls were like that in Pi Phi and Kappa."

Anna found the conversations to be stilted at Chi-O, and thought AOPi was too small, but her favorites were DG, Kappa and Theta. For her, the first round of rush also dispelled stereotypes, allowing her to make her own judgments.

"I didn't have any solid ideas of what to expect past the rumors. After meeting girls, I was surprised because I was like, 'Oh well, that's not really true, that's not the impression they gave me.'"

Jenny, however, wasn't completely convinced that the stereotypes were all fiction. She says of one of the Core Four: "They were really nice and cool, but they weren't exactly as real. They were really, really cool and nice for girls that were so good-looking. It's like when you meet a really rich person that isn't a total douchebag, you're like, 'Wow, that guy is so nice.' And it's not because he's actually so nice, it's because he's so nice for someone who's so wealthy. It's all relative.

"[At their event], it was like looking into the sun. You don't want to look directly at them. You're like, 'Oh my God, how are you so good-looking?' It's just very strange."

For all the girls, philanthropy, the focus of Round 2, was an important factor. The four girls got invited back to either seven or six sororities, doing well in rush terms, but Kate was discouraged when she was cut from all the Core Four sororities.

"I was a little disappointed at first because I actually thought I liked some of them from the first round, but at the end of the day I was happy," she says. "I think it said something when those are the only four I didn't get back."

Anna got her top four choices back but was initially disappointed at getting invited back to two sororities that she had originally cut from her list. After the second round though she says she was glad that it offered her a new perspective on one of them.

But after just a round of cuts, the tears started and everyone knows a girl who's dropped out.

"One of my friends broke down crying because this morning she didn't get in any Core Four," Emma says. "I think a lot of girls are blaming themselves, but it's way, way not in their control at all."

In the next round, the freshmen could be invited back to a maximum of five sororities, and it's clear that the relaxed attitudes about rush are giving way to more serious ones. The girls all say that their conversations are getting less superficial, and they have clear favorites among their remaining choices. And although most of them feel confident in the connections they've made with upperclassmen, they are all still wary of the fickleness of the process.

Jenny's favorite is a Core Four sorority that she asked not be named, one that even before rush, upperclassmen told her she would fit into. She's worried before Round 4 that her luck will run out in the latter rounds because she has gotten all of her top choices in the previous two rounds-she has just gone back to the Core Four plus DG.

"Because you've already set yourself apart from the herd, and now there's this more selective group of good-looking people, and you really need to try even harder to be good-looking," she says the day before Round 4. "I feel like people have tried harder and harder on their outfits and caring about their appearance as they go through it."

And she is aware that the process is changing her outlook on things, not necessarily for the better.

"It kind of makes you crazy, and I really don't like that. I kind of knew that this would happen, but you're like, 'Oh you didn't get asked back there? Well I did; therefore, I am superior to you.' I find myself thinking that, and it's so destructive," she says. "It's hard because the process makes you want to conform, just because you want people to like you. But I've definitely tried to be myself: kind of sarcastic, attempts at being witty, talk about things that I care about, and when I say things like, 'Oh my gosh there's no good shopping in Durham,' I know it's really vapid and stupid.

"But really, there is no good shopping in Durham."

For Emma, Alpha Phi is her clear-cut favorite, and because she feels she formed a strong bond with a girl she met in the second round, she thinks her chances of getting a bid are good.

"This is what I wanted. This is what I thought would happen. I would find one where I could talk to the girls about stuff without feeling like I have to hide parts of me," she says of her frank conversations about pre-med ambitions and boys.

But after talking to her recruitment counselors a few hours before preference night is scheduled to start, Emma learns that she wasn't asked back to Alpha Phi for the last round of rush, and she decides to drop out of the process.

"I'm really not upset," she says. Just surprised because she had seen two Alpha Phi girls out the night before, and they had greeted her with big hugs.

"They shouldn't act like that if they did know that I wasn't going to get invited back," Emma says emphatically. "I just don't know how it works. I just don't get it at all."

Kate is also disappointed when her first choice, DG, doesn't invite her back to the last round, but out of her three remaining choices she would be happy joining Alpha Phi or Zeta.

"At Alpha Phi's Round Four ceremony I actually got kind of emotional. That was kind of a sign that I would fit in," she says of her new top choice. "So maybe it's a blessing in disguise."

When faced with filling out her final preference card, Anna says it was a difficult decision.

"By the end of this round I realized that not only had my perceptions about certain sororities changed completely, but that the sororities that I initially overlooked were now some of my favorites," she says. "I went with my gut, and not with my head, because my head was filled with ideas and comments that other girls and older guys had said... while my gut feeling was surely a more accurate way of telling what I really wanted."

Bid Day 2007 dawned grey, wet and dreary. For both Kate and Anna, however, the rain didn't dampen their excitement about getting bids to their top choices.

"Before I had even started rushing I had definitely chosen [it] as my number one," Anna says of the Core Four sorority she joined. "There were a lot of girls that were from different cultures and different races. I'd rather have that than have a group of 30 girls who looked or were just like me."

Although Kate's favorite shifted from round to round as her options changed, she's really happy to join Alpha Phi.

"I don't know if it was necessarily my first choice throughout my entire recruitment, but by the end it was," she says. "I think I stayed myself the whole time. I don't think I changed, so I probably wouldn't have done anything differently."

But Jenny was surprised when she got a bid from a Core Four sorority that wasn't the one she had in mind.

"I was like definitely bummed, but not when it first happened," she says. "I was like, 'Oh whatever' and then there's this whole craziness screaming and cheering. but I called my mom late at night, and that's when I fully realized, 'Crap, I'm really sad.' It's just a super awkward social situation, where you think you're going to fit in with these girls, but then they don't pick you."

She says she's happy, but it's too early to tell whether this is the place for her, and whether she'll stay in her new sorority.

"I still do have faith in the system-you're going to end up where you're supposed to be," Jenny says. "I'm happy about where I am. Going out last night hanging out with my sisters, friends, I'm definitely keeping an open mind about it."

Lounging in sweats the afternoon of Bid Day, senior Bethany Schraml, Panhel vice president for recruitment and membership, says she's relieved recruitment is over, and that she thinks the last week was a success.

"Today when we had the revealing ceremony and everything, I looked around and most girls seemed happy, seemed excited," she says. "Though recruitment is not the most perfect process, at the end, for most girls it does seem to work out. That's evidenced by the fact that most girls do stay in their chapters for all four years and that almost fifty percent of women at Duke are greek."

Schraml says her own rush experience was imperfect, and she joined a chapter that initially wasn't her first choice. That knowledge propelled her to change this year's process, providing more information to freshmen women-potential new members in Panhel-ese-in the fall semester, making the process more transparent and loosening the rigid rules that surround rush.

For instance, before this year, because of a "no booze, no boys" rule constraining conversations during the rounds, Alpha Phi would've been fined when one of its members talked to Emma about similar relationship experiences-a connection that was meaningful to her.

Emma says she doesn't regret going through formal recruitment, and that she will consider informal rush options, but she's not content with the process, either.

"I think it's weird that we don't have a say at all. They like to pretend that we do, but we don't pick them-they pick us," she says of the rush power dynamic. "I don't like that. I think it should be our choice, not theirs. I know which sororities I could've fit in and which ones I couldn't."

Schraml debates this view, saying that she talked to many girls on preference night who had a hard time deciding how to rank their favorites.

"It seemed like for the majority of the girls, the choice to make was on them, which I always think is better than the sororities choosing them. They were given a decision to make, and that's a good sign," she says. "Obviously it's going to be impossible to match each girl to her first-choice chapter initially, but we hope as they go through the process that they get to know the chapters a little bit better.. It is very much a mutual selection process, because the girls definitely have the power to release themselves from the sororities they don't want to go back to along the entire way."

She admits, however, that "releasing" oneself from a sorority means the freshman is not maximizing her options, and thus releasing herself from a guaranteed bid.

Anna says she admires all the work that went into organizing the two-week process, although in retrospect she wishes some of her decisions had been less superficial.

Both Schraml and Panhel President Chrissie Gorman, a senior, compare the superficial aspects of rush to a job interview.

"No, you can't get to know a girl incredibly well in a five-minute conversation, and that's unfortunate. I think it's sort of the nature of the process, and I also think it parallels a lot of other things in life where sort of a snap judgment is being made," Schraml says.

Jenny, however, used a similar metaphor but draws a vastly different conclusion.

"College admissions is based on test scores, extracurriculars, your grades. But this is based entirely on other females' perceptions of you, and these really superficial things that you can't control," she says. "If you had great test scores and everything going on for you and you got rejected by Yale, at least you know what you're being judged on, whereas here you're like, 'Oh my gosh, am I ugly because I didn't get into Core Four?'"

To her, the superficial nature of rush seems like a "necessary evil."

"Of course my self-confidence took a hit. How could you go through such a superficial process and not feel insecure? Everybody feels bad going through rush," she says the day after Bid Day. "You could just look at the girls waiting outside in line constantly running their fingers through their hair, applying lip gloss and see that everybody's freaked and insecure and unsure.

"No matter how we feel about the process, we all kind of go in there with the veneer of falsity. We smile really big and our voice gets, like, eight octaves higher," she says. "I'm honest because I understand that this is how it works, but I'm not above it. I mean, I'm doing it.

"I don't transcend the insecurities that come along with being a freshman girl."

*The names of the four freshmen were changed to protect their identities.