Another year of formal sorority recruitment has come and gone. The 2016 potential new member class totaled at 396 women by the end of the week, each excited to have found their new home. 

Most of the Potential New Members (PNMs) are freshmen approaching their second semester, but a few of the women may be further into their Creighton undergraduate career. 

Women go through the somewhat stressful process for a variety of reasons, the main one being to “branch out, meet new people who [they] wouldn’t have met otherwise,” according to Katie Weidler, a 2016 College of Nursing PNM, who ended up finding her home in Theta Phi Alpha. 

Creighton offers a total of seven sororities for young women to visit: Alpha Phi, Delta Delta Delta, Delta Zeta, Gamma Phi Beta, Kappa Kappa Gamma, Pi Beta Phi and Theta Phi Alpha.

Throughout the week sororities are given an area of interest within the Greek community for each day and are expected to comply with that theme in order to create a well-rounded recruitment experience. 

Recruitment events occur either in Skutt Student center or in Harper throughout the week.

The weekly schedule of recruitment has traditionally been presented as the following:

• Monday is Go Greek Day. Each sorority presents a video and dances to express the personality of the chapter before diving into conversations on this day;
• Tuesday is Philanthropy Day and each sorority talks about their unique philanthropies, engaging PNMs by doing service-based crafts; 
• Wednesday is a day off of recruitment for the first day of classes;
• Thursday is Skit Day and the sorority performs a short play for the PNMs; including whatever information they want the women going through recruitment to remember;
• Friday is Preference Day, or “Pref Day,” where each affiliated member has the opportunity to have a longer, more intimate conversation with a woman she connected with earlier in the week. 

This year, the panhellenic council decided to alter the schedule slightly by getting rid of Thursday’s “Skit Day” and instead having a “Sisterhood Day” which made things “more conversation-based” and “less about what was in the room and more about who was in the room” according to Tori Sandene, (this year’s panhellenic Vice President of Membership). 

Sandene also added that the new changes made the “atmosphere for the whole week a lot better.”

Women are expected to visit each recruitment room at least once and, from there, whittle down their options until they are left with two sororities upon Pref Day. 

Simultaneously, members of each sorority narrow down their own list of women based on who they best connect with and who they see best fitting into their chapter. 

This seemingly harsh system may not be what a PNM expects entering into a formal recruitment, but according to Kayma Wolday who is now a sophomore in Gamma Phi Beta, “every girl who is chosen to be in your sorority is chosen on purpose.” 

She said being on the other side of the decision makes her “proud to be in a sorority that really fought for me and wanted me” when she went through as a PNM in 2015.

The system seems to work for other women too. 

According to Kate Christian, one of many women in Creighton’s Greek community who disaffiliated from her own sorority in order to impartially advise the 2016 PNM class, the best part of recruitment was being able “to watch a couple of them receive their bids on bid day and they were almost in tears they were so excited […] it was awesome to see them so happy.”