<p>JKpoker2: I hope you’re not ■■■■■■■■, but either way, you do bring up good points about common misconceptions of fraternities and what they really are.</p>
<p>You see, pledgeship isn’t about memorizing nicknames and getting hazed. It’s about trying out a new fraternity and seeing if you’d fit in as a brother. For an analogy, a getting a bid is like being asked out on a date, accepting a bid is agreeing to the date, pledging is entering a long-term relationship, and initiation is marriage.</p>
<p>Now, some of the “organizations” who have lost track of their values think that abusing pledges by making them memorize pointless nicknames, causing them to fail class, and hazing them as punishment is a way to test whether or not they’d fit in the house. They use that to test people’s loyalty, but at the end, it just tests how much bull some pledges are willing to put up with; in this case, far too much! That’s not how pledging is supposed to work, and calling that pledging is same as calling the act of going to class: sleeping.</p>
<p>In my fraternity, we have an intense pledging process, and when we bid anyone, we ask them about their courseload and advise them about the workload involved in the pledging process. As a rule, the pledging process is not supposed to interefere with academics as that’s supposed to be the reason why you’re in college. For the next few weeks, we run these “new member education” sessions that teach them how we work, while they get to know the rest of the house by being required to hang out with each and every one of the brothers on mutually-agreed terms. The final week, I-week, we advise pledges about it far in advance and work with them to make sure that they will be able to handle it without adversely affecting their studies. That week is analogous to the significant event you have with someone before you move from being casual friends to close friends. Still, there’s no hazing – it’s an intense bonding session with all the brothers, and everyone participates, not just the pledges. After all, brotherhood is a two-way relationship.</p>
<p>On a side note, the reason why several of us don’t say which fraternities we’re from is because it doesn’t really matter. After all, on here, I’m just “excelblue” – a college student attending UC Berkeley who’s in a fraternity. With a bit of research, you can probably find out, but when I make a comment, I feel that my personal situation (and, thus, which house I’m in) is irrelevant. If you’re truly curious and have a good reason to ask, I’d be more than happy to state it though.</p>