The second year of spring rush wrapped up with sororities offering an increased number of bids and Gamma Delta Chi again attracting a significantly larger spring pledge class than any other fraternity.
Completing an over week-long process for sororities and a shorter stint for fraternities, participants in spring rush have recently received and accepted their bids for membership.
Between nine and 12 bids were given out by each of the six sororities, while the number of bids for fraternities ranged from one to 18. The Panhellenic Council has stricter regulations for sorority rush than does the Inter Fraternity Council for fraternity rush, which leads to the balanced number of bids among the sororities.
Of the 73 women who initially registered for rush, 11 dropped out before the end of the process. Of the 62 girls remaining, 61 received bids and one dropped out on Preference night, the last night of rush.
"That's a very high retention rate [for the second round of rush] compared to other years," said Vice President of Panhell Julia Keane '04. In last year's spring rush, approximately 65 girls registered and 20 dropped out.
Alpha Xi Delta gave out nine bids, Delta Delta Delta, Epsilon Kappa Theta, Kappa Kappa Gamma, and Sigma Delta all gave out ten, and Kappa Delta Epsilon gave out 12.
"We were really fortunate to get so many great girls back on Pref night," said KDE President Alexis Sheehan '04. "I don't think that numbers are ever really a problem. In KDE, the more the merrier, especially with the D-Plan, because people are always off at different times."
The Inter Fraternity Council does not have a centralized system that keeps track of how many men rush different houses. The number of bids offered also does not always equal the number of bids accepted at each house.
The number of bids accepted at each fraternity are as follows: Alpha Chi, one; Alpha Delta, five; Bones Gate, six; Chi Gamma Epsilon, four; Chi Heorot, three; Gamma Delta Chi, 18; Kappa Kappa Kappa, three; Phi Delta Alpha, seven; Psi Upsilon, three; Sigma Alpha Epsilon, four; Sigma Nu, three; Sigma Phi Epsilon, nine; and Theta Delta Chi, six.
Spring pledge classes are significantly smaller in the Spring term for most of the fraternities, as the majority of '05s are looking to join houses in the winter.
"A lot of our membership is winter sport athletes, so we only saw three guys this spring," said Chi Heorot President, Zach Erbe '04. "Spring rush is not as intense because the focus is on Winter term rush."
However, the switch from fall to winter for the first round of rush has lead to imbalances in pledge classes and less time to train sophomores for officer positions for the Summer term. Gamma Delt, for example, had five new members in the winter and 18 this term, 17 of whom are football players who took off in the winter due to the training schedule.
"The guys who rush in the spring have a tighter bond with each other than the guys who rush in the winter, [so] they're almost seen as two different classes, which can be hard," Gamma Delt President Mario Avila '04 said.
With the majority of their pledge class just joining the house, "now we have to train new members to be officers in the summer in one term, and as a pledge you don't know yet if you even want to be an officer," he said.
This is the second year that the second round of rush took place in the spring. Leaders of the Greek Houses are still advocating moving rush back to the fall.
