Fraternity and Sorority Life

excelblue
Sun, 06 May 2012 18:33:03 +0000

Post above pretty much sums it up.

Yeah, you can form very strong friendships, except it’s much harder. As part of a Greek organization, I quickly gained ~30 brothers. At the same time, spending about 1/3 the time with friends outside my chapter, I only managed to get one friend outside my chapter that I’d consider just as close. In a fraternity, each person brings in one or two people, and since everyone already has similar values, you get several more bonds quicker due to all the leverage by your brothers. It also helps that there are established rules/practices on what to do / not to do to make the process as efficient as possible.

After four years of college, I ended up with ~20 lifelong friends thru my fraternity (tbh, I bonded well with most, but not necessarily all, of my brothers), 5 thru serving on Interfraternity Council, and 2 more outside of Greek Life.

I also learned a lot of leadership skills in my fraternity as we experienced failures that would usually kill off most organizations / businesses. However, the brotherhood allowed for a level of resilience to work through those mistakes to correct them and avoid them elsewhere.

That’s my summation of it. Explaining Greek Life to outsiders is like explaining the importance of college to working-class parents who see it as a way to remove four years of income from a young person. There’s a gap of understanding that must be crossed.