Women dive into 20 Party on campus

On Saturday morning, campus was nearly empty. A few students roamed the streets with backpacks or iPods. Several tour groups sauntered through campus, and one dad asked, commenting on the empty campus, “Does everyone go home on weekends on this campus?”

They don’t, the tour guide said. This weekend is the beginning of women’s Rush.

Rush is the annual event when many women on campus attempt to find a sorority that’s right for them to join. During 20 Party on Saturday and Sunday, the prospective new members visited each sorority for 30 minutes to get to know the girls, the chapter and what that sorority stands for.

Freshmen Katie Stasa and Britney Pennycook both went through 20 Party this weekend, and both said Rush was nothing like they expected.

“I thought that we were going to be in a big room with a big group of girls interviewing us,” Stasa said. “But it was a lot more personal. Most of the time it was just one-on-one, so you really got to know the girl.”

The houses also exceeded Pennycook’s expectations.

“There’s a lot of preconceived notions about a lot of the houses,” Pennycook said. “And it really proved everything wrong today, seeing everything firsthand and
meeting all of the girls.”

The prospective members stood outside every house upon arriving, the lines stretching down the front steps and lawns to border the streets. From outside each house, even blocks away, chanting and screaming from the sororities echoed around campus.
Katie Reed, president of Alpha Gamma Delta, was one of the girls behind the chanting.

“The cheers are kind of like the first thing that you’re seeing,” Reed said. “It’s like full-on screaming. I mean, we’re so excited we’re screaming, welcoming them to the chapter house. And then you do your chapter’s cheer. I mean, you get the cheers stuck in your head by the end of the week. You know every single one because you can’t get it out of your head.”

The chanting took Stasa off guard.

“At the first house, it was actually really frightening because none of us were expecting it,” she said. “And then, in one of the houses, they sat us down in a little room, and they stood all around us, and they started doing this ridiculously loud chant, and we were so frightened, but it was so much fun because you get so excited.”

After the chanting stopped, the girls were led into the house and sat down for one-on-one talks with the women in the chapter, Stasa said. From here, they were often given house tours and were free to ask questions and have open conversations with the women about their chapter.

Stasa said she has learned how to keep up conversations through Rush.

“It’s really made me better at talking to people and just, like, trying to be polite and happy at all times, even when I’m exhausted,” Stasa said. “All I want to do is sleep and eat.”

She said the questions typically involved things like name, major and the dorm she lives in, but sometimes they were more creative.

“The hardest question that they asked was what is your creepiest memory of IU,” Stasa said. “I just kind of skirted around that question. One of my favorites was they asked me what my weirdest screen name is. We laughed about that for a long time.”

Although the weekend was long, Pennycook said it was an overall positive experience.

“My favorite part was just meeting the girls and finding out what every sorority is really like,” she said. “I found the more girls I talked to, they were all really different and individual people. Every house isn’t just one personality type.”

Before Rush began, Reed said she gave potential members the advice to “just make sure that you’re being yourself.”

Pennycook said this advice rang true for her.

“You can be yourself and still be in a house with different people,” she said.