aphi rush pdf?

^!

As soon as PNMs left the Beta Delta house, the sisters would score us on that 1-10 scale, recap our conversation, and write down the name of a sister whom we were similar to in order to ensure that we would all meet like-minded individuals and have the best recruitment experience possible. It wasn’t all that personally upsetting for us to hear because we all knew that we must have been high on the “how well does she fit in” scale, and that shared, comfortable energy allowed us to feel alright about the fact that we, too, would have to score girls. The scoring process ensured that no one would slip through the cracks, recruitment would run efficiently, and everyone would end up in the best-fit chapter for them. The recruitment chairs assured us that it wasn’t evil—it was essential.
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But, they chose their words carefully. The recruitment chairs constantly reminded us that no one gets a score of “zero,” because every girl going through recruitment would fit in on some level. They drilled it into our heads, over and over again, that we were scoring girls on how much they reminded us of our current sisters rather than valuing them on our perceived quality of their individual character. It wasn’t offensive because giving a girl a score of 4/10 wasn’t declaring that she was a 4/10 individual, it was only suggesting that she would get along better with girls in a different chapter of our community.
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They did tell us, however, to pay close attention to the column of the scorecard that asked which of our current sisters the PNM reminds us of. They told us that if we did not have an answer to this question, it was an effective indicator that Beta Delta was probably not the best place for her.
 
They didn’t have to say it in a way that was more explicit or more vicious than that; they didn’t have to tell us what it meant to be “similar to” or “dissimilar to” our current sisters; they didn’t have to tell us exactly what quantified worth of membership in our undoubtedly yet indistinctly elite community.
 
Whether we admitted it to ourselves or not, we knew.

I don't really know how to describe my reaction upon discovering the details of the process in which I would need to take part at the beginning of my junior year. I guess I would say that I was surprised not by the qualifications but rather by the importance of them in deciding whether girls would be invited back, and, I was appalled but, admittedly, also flattered. It was clear from our wide mouths and our chorus of "you can't be serious" scoffs that my two fellow recruitment chairs, the chapter president, and myself were in a shared state of disappointment, disgust, shock, and strange amusement.
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It wasn't so appalling only because I had learned that the process that had brought me to my closest friends was truly just a deliberate beauty competition or because girls' worth and value to this friendship-based organization was being quantified by physical appearance—the worst part was that I would have to lead it, and the national organization would tell me exactly how to do so.
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I realized that I knew exactly what the recruitment chairs had meant when they said, "If you can't think of a Beta Delta she reminds you of, she probably doesn't belong here." How could she "remind us" of a current sister if all of our current sisters look a certain way, and she doesn't? 
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I realized that appearances factored into my decision-making even when I was not consciously admitting that to myself. I never would have allowed myself to even think, "I'm giving her a 4 even though the conversation was fine because she's not pretty enough to be in this house." I never would have admitted that the only reason I gave that girl whom I had a boring conversation with an 8 was because she was beautiful.
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And now, a year later, I was telling the sophomores to score PNMs on a 1-10 scale of "how well the PNM fit into Beta Delta," knowing those scores to be completely meaningless.
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I learned that Chapter Scores were only a mask: a way to avoid telling everyone what they subconsciously already partially knew. Beta Delta's national policy demanded that our decision to invite girls to the second round was determined completely independently of their time spent at Beta Delta. It was determined by their "External Prescores" weeks before sorority recruitment even began.
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And so it goes: 1,200 names fall off recruitment profiles and into the Facebook search bar, where we must ask a series of important questions, created by nationals, of her public photos that will determine her "External Prescore" on a scale of 1-10.
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1. Is she naturally pretty?
2. Does she look like your current sisters?
3. Is she trendy?
4. Would you want to see her in your letters?
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10: She's "ideally beautiful"―thin with silky hair, great style, and an appealing face―and therefore we want her in Beta Delta.
1: She is definitely not "pretty enough" to be in this chapter.

Part 4

COFFEE DATES
WHICH OF MY FRIENDS ARE PRETTY & PERSONABLE ENOUGH TO MEET OUR TOP RECRUITS?
You would think that the worst is over. You would think that now that the External Prescoring process has ensured that all members of Beta Delta have met the distorted beauty requirements, the young women can exist in a world of ignorant bliss. The objectifying way in which membership to Beta Delta is granted should be complete. The girls do not know how they were selected, so they should be able to focus on finding friendship and security in this new chapter of their lives. 
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They had all been deemed pretty "good" enough to be worthy of joining Beta Delta's sisterhood, and beauty would no longer be a factor in explicitly quantifying their worth during their four years at Michigan.
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That is, until the next year. And the year after that. And the year after that. 
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Each time I entered the Beta Delta basement to mindlessly follow orders and contribute to the External Prescoring process, I carefully left my humanity at the door. I reminded myself that these girls whom I was valuing on the most superficial of scales were only strangers to me. I tried to tell myself that it was no different than sitting beside my mother and sister watching the Academy Awards and commenting on how beautiful Nicole Kidman looked in that blue dress but how Emily Blunt had never looked worse. They were strangers presenting their best selves for the world to see.  
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Red carpets. Facebook profiles.
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But, all of a sudden, they weren't strangers anymore, and the door wasn't heavy enough to lock my humanity outside.

In order to follow orders, I had to allow my moral brain to exist in an alternate universe where everything was secondary to beauty and that was the norm and that was valuable and that was guiltless. 

Each year, during the Spring semester, Beta Delta's recruitment chairs send an email to the sophomore pledge class that includes a sign up sheet for "Coffee Dates" with the intention of getting the girls excited about recruiting a new pledge class in the Fall. The rush chairs tell the sophomores that they want to meet with them in small groups for about fifteen minutes just to learn more about their experiences with recruitment, how much they enjoyed the process, and, of course, what things they especially liked about Beta Delta's recruitment process or what other houses did better than we did.
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They begin each "Coffee Date" by telling the sisters that everything we discuss there, and all recruitment discussions going forward, must remain confidential within the sisters of Beta Delta.  

As a sophomore, I nodded compliantly. The rush chairs were stern in their demands, and so we let them set the serious yet excited tone to gossip about all things recruitment. They encouraged us to talk about our personal experiences with recruitment and to join in enthusiastically in agreement or disagreement with each other. Their curious eyes lit up as we told them of Zeta Beta Gamma's truffle desserts and Pi Mu's heart-wrenching philanthropy presentation. Their fingers typed furiously as they sat opposite us.
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They whispered through their smiles as we walked away.​
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A year later, it was my turn. And, like everything else, the Coffee Dates were lies and disguises. 
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The smiling former recruitment chairs finally let the four of us hear the whispers. They told us of the national policies that we would need to follow in order to be the most desirable chapter on campus. They told us that the superficial scoring—the messed up way in which we determined the value of potential sisters—didn't end upon membership; it just changed. 
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They told us that we would need to rank the current sisters of Beta Delta on a scale of 1-10 in order to determine their "recruiting strength." 30% of that score would be determined by how personable and outgoing they were and how positive they seemed about the recruitment process in general. 70% percent of that score would be their External Score.  
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They were all sisters, and their External Prescores had once been high enough to grant them membership. Their seven-and-above External Scores, however, had been relative to 1,200 PNMs. Now, we would need to score them relative to each other, and they couldn't all be scored highly—they couldn't all be equally worthy of meeting our most desirable recruits. So, we looked at our friends and sisters and belittled their worth into only numbers.
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The Coffee Dates were only a discrete way to ask the vicious questions.
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How much did you enjoy talking to girls while you were going through recruitment?​
How much will girls enjoy talking to you during recruitment?
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What other house would you have done if you hadn't done Beta Delta?
Did other "top" houses want you? In other words, did you "rush well"?
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Whispering smiles
What's her External Score relative to the rest of the chapter?

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These were girls I would enjoy these four years with. These were girls I would maybe one day ask for career advice or professional help. These were girls I would be connected to forever. These were some of my closest friends. Who was I to label them with numbers—numbers that would represent how pretty and how personable I thought they were that would thus define how well I thought they would be able to recruit new members into our "sisterhood"?
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Who was I?

The next step was to form the sisters into "bump groups," or groups of girls who would meet the same PNMs and make decisions about them. All of the houses did it, and there was no shame in doing so. After all, everyone wanted to ensure that PNMs got a true feel for each house, and they wouldn't be able to do so after meeting only one sister. At Beta Delta, we told the girls that we grouped them in the way that we did in order to show PNMs that there was no "typical Beta Delta girl," and we were made up of young women from all different backgrounds and with varied interests. 
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And that's exactly what we did: we ensured that the girls in each bump group were "different" from each other. 
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We ensured that each bump group had a mix of girls from Florida and California and Chicago rather than having a bump group of girls who were all from Michigan. We ensured that each bump group had some louder girls who were fully of personality and also some more laid-back, easygoing girls. We ensured that each bump group had an even ratio of blondes to brunettes.
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But among these "unique differences,"  there was one way that the girls in each bump group, without question, were exactly the same. 
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Bump Group 1 would include only sisters who were scored as nines and tens. Bump Group 14 would include only sisters who were scored as ones and twos. 
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And it didn't end there.
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There was more organizing to be done in order to avoid the chaos that is 1,200 girls coming in and out of a sorority house for twenty-five-minute conversations in a span of eight hours. The sisters understood that the literal moving parts of this process had to be systematic as well. Specifically, each bump group would have a predetermined seat in an assigned area of the house so that the sisters and their PNMs would not have to run around in circles looking for an open place to chat. It made methodical sense, just as everything else did.
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Bump groups 10-14 and their PNMs would sit on the hardwood chairs in the brown, empty dining room. Bump groups 4-9 would sit on the beige rugs and couches in the light, yellow living room.
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Bump groups 1-3 would get comfortable on the couches in the smaller extra living room. The idea was that, in this enclosed space, PNMs would look around at the room full of pretty Beta Delta girls, and the pretty PNMs whom they were rushing, and admire these girls who might all become their sisters.
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The chaos that we worked so hard to control fiercely returned during the ten-minute scoring break between each round. The Living Room Girls would whisper-shout about girls they wanted as their "little sisters," and the Dining Room Girls would stare enviously and whine about how they hadn't met anyone "good" yet. It didn't take more than a few rounds for the Dining Room Girls to figure out that they had not met and might not meet a single girl who "reminded them of their current sisters."
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It didn't take more than a few rounds for them to figure out that no one whom they would speak to would be invited back to the next round.
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They noticed that if and when they did have the opportunity to recruit girls who might become sisters of Beta Delta, it was only when the lines got messed up, and they picked up the wrong girl.

Part 6
FLAGGING
LET'S JUST DOUBLE CHECK.
You thought it ended there, didn't you?
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It couldn't possibly get any more calculated or ridiculous or laughably shallow. But it can. It always can.
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That brings me to "Flagging." Yes—another dumb name for another dumb process. Another euphemism. Like "Coffee Dates." Or "External Score."
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Or "Does she remind you of your current sisters?"
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As PNMs entered the loud house full of screaming and cheering sisters, Jen From Nationals stood behind the chanting sisters with her clipboard and completed the nationally-ordered process of Flagging. The clipboard had a list of the names of all the girls who were coming that party, and as they walked through the door, Jen looked at their faces and their name tags and took notes next to their names: "     ," "CG," or "MG." Those labeled as "stars" were classified as beautiful, deserving of receiving a bid, and in need of meeting our strongest recruiters. Those labeled as "CG" were not "bad-looking" and "Could Go" if enough PNMs were prettier, and thus more deserving of an invitation to the next round. Those labeled as "MG" absolutely "Must Go." No questions asked. 
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During the parties, there were so many things going on, and everyone was invested in their own conversations and obligations. No one would ever notice. I surely didn't until I had to.
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The twisted idea behind this process, like the others, is that people often present their best selves online, and sometimes, girls look different in person. Therefore, External Scores based on Facebook profiles are not always the most accurate way of judging appearances.
 
We were taught to think of Flagging as "double checking."
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It worked both ways. Sometimes, girls looked better in person than they did online, and we needed to take notes to ensure that those girls were "saved" and rushed "harder" in rounds going forward. Flagging was our way of saving the pretty girls from the dining room and ensuring that everyone in the living room was worthy of being there.

"Saving" the "worthy" PNMs wasn't always as simple as bumping a star's External Score up to where it belonged and vowing to rush her like the queen that her appearance suggested that she was. 
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The matching process failed us one or two out of every five recruitment parties. We could never figure out why it was so difficult for the sisters to know their correct places in the lines and meet the right girl. 
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But that's when it became our responsibility to "save" the "good" PNMs from the detrimental experience that would be ending up with the wrong sister in the dining room. 
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As the recruitment team, we had to ensure that the star PNMs would have the best recruitment experience possible. They had to meet our strongest recruiters, and as the rush team, it was our responsibility to meet all star PNMs and make final decisions about them. If a star had been picked up by the wrong sister, it was especially important that we invade their conversation, force our "favorable" energy into what was thought to be an unfavorable situation, and avert the "crisis" that was a four recruiting a nine. 
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Sisters were often flattered when we wanted to come and join their conversations. Very few actually realized how incredibly offensive it often was. 
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Flagging was a little easier to deal with because I wasn't the one doing it; this one was entirely in the hands of nationals.
 
But that's mostly because they didn't trust us and feared that our moral judgment could allow us to manipulate this part of the process. Rightfully so.
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This was the once place where nationals could catch us if we had discreetly changed a PNM's Prescore in the Google Doc because we had heard great things about her and wanted to push her through even though she was thought to be externally unworthy of an invitation. 
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And that's just what we did, and nationals definitely caught it. 
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Bridgette Murphy was on Michigan's women's soccer team. Two of her closest friends from high school had joined Beta Delta during their freshman year at Michigan, but Bridgette hadn't yet rushed because she wasn't sure if it would work with her athletic schedule. Because of her high school friends, however, Bridgette quickly found a community within Beta Delta, and she was "socially" considered a sister by many of the girls. She even decided to rush sophomore year solely for the purpose of officially joining Beta Delta, and her twenty close friends in the chapter would make sure that it would happen for her. In the Prescoring Google Doc, we easily made her External Score a seven so that we, too, could make sure that it would happen for her.
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But Jen flagged her as a "Must Go."

^^^^^

Can I get a TLDR pot favor^^