Collins is a sophomore English major and can be contacted at [email protected].

Alpha Phi wishes you a successful semester! If you asked a member of Alpha Delta Pi, Delta Gamma, Kappa Alpha Theta or Kappa Kappa Gamma, she would have probably done the same. Our pens just got lost in the mail.

For sororities, image is everything. Every fall we come to campus a week before everyone else. We dress to impress and sing recruitment songs until the frat guys across the street are already 10 beers deep. While fighting to get the best pledge classes, we also work to win the highest GPAs, complete the most community service hours and raise the most money for our national philanthropies. A sorority’s stereotype during recruitment can make or break its success as a house. Whether perceived as the “grandmas,” the “fat girls” or even the “skanks,” sororities internationally work to rise above negative images and convince girls that their organization is worth being a part of—and it is. That’s why we go to such great lengths.

With spring recruitment right around the corner for some houses, Adam Block tank tops, Tiffany-inspired bracelets and even sorority-sponsored pens are sure to be cropping up all over campus. But with every sorority comes the individuals who make it what it is. There is always going to be that girl who stays at home every Saturday night and reviews her therapeutics notecards, someone who rocks the Dublin dance floor like she was paid to be there instead of paying to get in, and your sister who has never missed a Sigma Chi toga party, is hand-cuffed to the hottest FIJI and has fallen into the SAE Hawaiian moat every year.

Every girl plays an important role in her house and the recruitment process. If you’re already in a house, are looking to join or are a lifetime member of Gamma Delta Iota, it’s easy to forget that most houses on 34th Street don’t fit into a specific role. Together they make the Drake Greek system what it is — a group of people that, in the face of great adversity during the last year and a half, has continued to grow and thrive, not only as individuals, but also as a whole.