Greek life recruitment is a process in which students come and meet the members of fraternities or sororities to see if it’s the right fit for them.
Occurring twice a year, Greek life recruitment has taken place at the University of Denver since the late 1880s. A process lasting several days, each fraternity and sorority hosts events in which potential members are given the opportunity to visit each of the organizations they are interested in and meet members.
According to Christopher Miofsky, the Associate Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life at DU, the value of joining Greek life is good for “lifelong connections, long-term community engagement and support for identity development.”
He stated that the hope for these Greek life organizations is that the person joining the group will grow and, at the same time, the organization will grow with the advent of new people influencing it.
The fall recruitment of 2022 was pretty standard for fraternities. However, sororities saw a large dip in the number of people joining their organizations. The main reason for the dip in numbers is the time of the week the recruitment process took place this year, according to Marina Luna, the Student Director of Panhellenic Recruitment. According to Luna, the recruitment process usually lasts from Thursday to the following Monday.
This year, it went from Sunday to Thursday with a three-day break, ending the process on Monday. This situated the recruitment process during the school week, proving difficult for people to fit in recruitment with their busy school schedules. The reason for the new recruitment timeline was due to the conflicting obligations many students had, including the freshmen’ requirement to go to DU’s new mountain campus during the weekend.
Luna said that because many students had obligations to visit the mountain campus, “the sororities were asked to have their recruitment take place during the week, instead of the weekend.” As a result, “the turnout had a lot lower numbers than last year.”
Regardless of the lower recruitment rate, rush week was a success for many fraternities and sororities as they gratefully welcomed their new members.
