In which I decide to join a sorority
Spring rush season is about to be in full swing here at Purdue, which means that I am getting my first look into everything that happens behind the scenes in order for us to get a new pledge class of Phi Rhos. It's a little bit crazy to think that just one semester ago I was getting ready to embark on my induction into Phi Sigma Rho, and to think that rush now signifies my time as a new member coming to a close. So now I invite you to embark with me on a trip down memory lane as I recount how I came to be a Phi Rho
April 2017: Enter Phi Rho
My good friend, Ambar, and I wandered around the little atrium checking out the different booths set up and gathering flyers on the different clubs, courses, and services that Purdue offered to women engineers. We were grateful to be able to stretch our legs after the road trip that we had taken with our moms to get here. In all honesty, the only reason that we even decided to attend this information fair was because of the promise of free cookies. After all, we were only juniors in high school and we weren't even sure if we were going to apply to Purdue, much less need tutoring help from Jane Doe, as nice as she was. We did our best to play the attentive student, nodding our head when it seemed right, asking a few questions when we were prompted, but we couldn't keep our eyes from wandering to the trays of cookies in the middle of the room.
Eventually we reached a booth proudly displaying some Greek letters that I didn't recognize.
"Well at least this one is different from the rest," I thought to myself.
The girl at the table eagerly told us that this was the only engineering social sorority on campus, a rarity in the United States. I took a minute to process what she said.
"Wait, you can do that?" I remember thinking to myself.
As someone who has surrounded myself with a large, close-knit group of female friends for most of my life, I was fearful of what a future in engineering might mean. I was plagued by nightmares of sitting down in a lecture hall only to realize that I was the only girl in the room, after all wasn't the stereotype that only boys are engineers? And as one of four girls in my high school engineering class, I didn't have much evidence to the contrary. However, here was this girl, claiming to be an engineer, claiming that I could join a group of 200 other engineers who are also girls. She certainly had my attention. Then, her claims became a little more outrageous. As a social sorority, she explained that by rushing we would be able to have a social life and participate fully in Greek life. Her story might not have been believable, but she had caught sixteen year old Hannah's attention.
I had grown up hearing my mom talk fondly of her college days, especially her experience in Delta Zeta. Occasionally she would talk about what her "mom" and "sisters" were up to. Despite being confused about the terminology, I knew that I wanted to be in a sorority when I went to college. If you asked any of my high school friends, or teammates from the soccer or swim teams, or really anyone who kind of knows me, they would confirm that I was going to make a killer sorority sister one day. They did just that when Ambar and I got back to school and told them all about Purdue and its sorority for engineers. However, the sorority soon faded to the back of my memory as AP Exam season, summer, and senior year quickly approached.
August 2018: I Become a Boilermaker
August brought my start at college. Part of my transition to college included attending a week long orientation to help me learn how to navigate campus, to introduce me to new people, to make new friends, and to familiarize myself with Purdue's many clubs on campus. My orientation group started with three guys, but by the end of the first day they had all vanished, never to be seen again. That left a group of ten girls (give or take depending on the day) to take on Purdue. A particularly hot conversation topic at meals soon became whether or not we were planning on participating in rush. Someone at some point in Purdue's history decided that it would be a great idea to have prospective sorority sisters rush in the fall, specifically the weekend after the first week of classes. This meant that if we planned on rushing, the girls in my orientation group would pretty much have to decide by the end of orientation, regardless of whether our new school schedules actually fit Greek life or not. All week we bounced back and forth between deciding to rush or not.
I had extra difficulty deciding whether or not to rush. I had already bitten off more than enough between engineering and joining the honors college, and as much as I wanted to join a sorority, I just didn't know if it fit into my schedule. And then, by some miracle, a long recessed memory resurfaced in my brain and I was reminded of the engineering social sorority. After a few Google searches, some Instagram stalking, and several frantic texts back and forth with my mom, the question was no longer "to rush or not to rush", it was "to rush, to rush Phi Rho, or not to rush." The Sunday before classes started, I reached my decision. In the sweltering August heat, I met up with the girls from my orientation group that had decided to rush, and we made our way to "Meet the Greeks", a fair for prospective sorority sisters and frat bros to meet representatives from each of the Greek houses on campus.
We joined the crowd of girls shuffling from table to table. As I talked to the representatives I realized that a "normal" sorority just wasn't what I was looking for, so I parted ways with the girls from orientation and headed out to track down the one sorority that I was interested in, Phi Rho. As I looked over there table and talked to Binuri, I knew that this was the right move for me. These girls understood the struggle of trying to balance a social life with a high level of academics, and I knew that they would be the best support system that Purdue could offer me. So, I marked my calendar with the date for call-outs, and enjoyed sleeping in and going to bed before 1 AM the next two weekends (the girls from orientation that decided to rush did not).
