Fraternity and Sorority Life

caemin
Sun, 06 May 2012 18:42:19 +0000

I am a founding member of a co-ed fraternity that is very new to my campus- so my experiences are a little different than single sex, established fraternities and sororities.

Pros:
Ability to meet new people you would otherwise not have met
Brotherhood (I’ll talk a bit more on this below)
Promotion of values/philanthropy/goals that you agree with

Cons:
Financial/time commitment (although the financial one, to me at least is the lesser one since I know where my dues go and what they are used for- we vote on the budget and how we allocate funds)
Some issues with group function (it can be difficult to get things done as a larger group)

I did not come to college with the intention of joining Greek life. However, that had more to do with the lack of organizations that interested me, and the lack of interest I had in most of the people who were joining the one org I might have joined that with general dislike of the system.

I saw an email about joining the founding class and I looked up the org. I liked what I saw and went to go meet the other interested people. I loved all of them. They were the sorts of people who I would have befriended anyway if had ever met them before. I am so grateful to my org for bringing together such an awesome group of people who are committed to promoting the same values that I have.

With regard to the brotherhood/siblinghood/sisterhood aspect, I feel that it is a slightly different relationship compared to a regular friendship. It is friendship that is enhanced by a common goal, organization and experience, and last but not least commitment to something greater than individual bonds. All of your siblings chose to join this organization because they believe in the goals of the organization (I chose to be a founding member because I wholeheartedly support my org’s message); they share this bond because they are members too- they went through the same process, the same rituals, and had a wonderful time doing it- if they didn’t enjoy it, I hope they would have dropped; and lastly, brotherhood is different than normal friendship because all of the people I call brother/sister because they want to help me and have me help them make our org better than it is now. The constant push to improve the experience, to fulfill our goals for the org, to ensure that we spread our message on campus together makes our bond very different from a regular friendship. We share a lot of things together and work to push a united message that we all believe in.

To me, that’s different that my regular close friendships. With them, I share experiences, but nothing as unifying as I do with my brothers. I’m very close to my friends, but except for one, I couldn’t call any of them my brothers because for that sort of friendship (without that unifying function of my org) the difference between sibling friend and close friend is a matter of time and background. Only of my friends (my best friend since fourth grade) really matches that. My brothers are my brothers because of the goals we work toward as we forge our bonds.