A new recruitment process to pledge for a fraternity at the UA was introduced in this fall.
According to Adam Geyer, president of the Interfraternity Council at the UA, the process was altered to give potential new members, or PNMs, the chance to see every fraternity on campus and to help all 17 chapters achieve their class size goals.
“We kind of formalized a process so that throughout the week, every PNM visits each fraternity, and as the week goes on, they mutually select each other,” Geyer said. “So by the end of the week they have a good idea of which fraternity is a good fit for them.”
With 900 PNMs this fall, the new rushing process was designed to make sure that every PNM was able to see every fraternity chapter on campus. In previous years, the process was more informal, Geyer said.
Previously, the process took place after fall classes began. Chapters would host events throughout the week, and PNMs were able to decide which events they wanted to attend. This ultimately led to an uneven distribution of members to chapters on campus.
“Chapters with bigger reputations saw more men and were kind of flooded with men. With only a few hours in the evening to host them, it was really hard to have a successful recruitment,” Geyer said. “We wanted to give our chapters more time and give our PNMs a better opportunity to see the 17 chapters that we have instead of just two or three.”
Jeremy Zilmer, coordinator of Fraternity & Sorority Programs, said that a lot of first-year students base their decisions on what they think is popular, what they see on social media or what they hear from their peers. With the old process allowing PNMs to choose which chapters they wanted to see, less renowned chapters struggled to achieve their new class size goals for the year.
“We wanted to have a process that was fair in the sense that it would put all our chapters on an equal playing field,” Zilmer said. “The point was to make it a more fair and equitable process.”
The new process shares similarities with the sorority recruitment process; however, it is specifically catered to men, according to Geyer.
The six-day process began last Tuesday and will end today when PNMs receive their bids. The first day, or the introduction day, consisted of the check-in process where PNMs met their recruitment counselors and included an educational session for PNMs and their parents.
This session covered hazing prevention and awareness, alcohol education and harm reduction, the process of recruitment and what to expect for the week and how to be successful throughout the week.
The official “Day One” began with all 900 recruits visiting all 17 chapters in “round-robin” style at the Tucson Convention Center. On the second day, PNMs visited up to nine chapters after the mutual selection process.
The third day consisted of the PNMs visiting up to four chapters at the chapters’ chosen locations. On day four, dubbed “Preference Night,” PNMs visited up to two chapters, leading into the fifth day, “Bid Day,” according to Sami Khalil, vice president of membership in the Interfraternity Council.
The Interfraternity Council, which includes all 17 chapters on campus and Fraternity & Sorority Programs, is confident that this new recruitment style will call for a more successful rush week and better turnouts of new class sizes for all chapters, Geyer said. They have received nothing but positive feedback from PNMs, and the fraternity chapters anticipate about 70-80 percent of PNMs to receive a bid this year as opposed to 43 percent in the previous year, according to Geyer.
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