genuine open rush advice

I never post on this site ever but I had no idea what I was doing in rush at this point last year and wanted to help people out. NOTHING HERE IS MEANT TO BE A RANKING. I REALLY JUST WANT TO GIVE ANONYMOUS ADVICE.

Basically by this point, most frats have their classes anywhere from 50%-70% selected. By “selected” I mean they know who they’re giving bids to and who will probably take it. After that, the remaining 40%-20% is going to go to kids they have already met and are deciding between (5 spots, 10 rushes to choose from). So if you’ve been rushing a frat for the whole semester and they’ve kept you around, you still have a decent chance of being in that block even if they haven’t given you an “ebid” or a “talk” or a “we want you” type thing that some of your friends have or if you feel like they’re iffy on you in general. “Open rush” is really deciding/wooing this group of kids who frats are still unsure about.

That final ~10% remaining for relevant frats, is how many spots they have for NEW people they’ll meet next week. This is typically close to 0 for places like theos, castle, and around 2-5 for the T2s at max based on how well their dirty rush went. This doesn’t apply to places below where it can be up to 9 for frats below that.

I don’t know everything but if I had to give genuine advice at this point for which places are taking the most kids “fresh”:

You will almost definitely not be able to fresh open rush theos, hall, zete, owls this year at all. If they haven’t met you/kept you around by this point, probably not gonna happen. If they haven’t met you yet, there’s a super low chance (every year 1 or 2 kids do this but it’s super rare) and I wouldn’t count on it unless you already have an “in” like close friends with ebids

These frats will probably take a couple or few kids: APES, castle, Zbt. Castle is having an abnormally tough time this year so if you have a connection it might be worth going for it. Apes is doing very well but in the last few years has taken a couple kids so might also be worth it. You def need a “in” tho. Both apes and ZBT gave out an insane amount of ebids this year tho so who knows.

Delt is special this year because they lost a lot of kids but will probably pull from athletic circles like they normally do. Will def take more than the ones above but probably not a huge amount, wouldn’t bank on it either. worth your time to rush.

Chances good (take a lot of kids from open rush every year): Fiji, SAE, sig chi, others. If you want to go here, you can definitely still open rush there.

I alluded to this earlier but if you want to open rush a competitive place (everything I said delt and above), find a friend who’s still rushing/will probably get a bid and get them to introduce you to the brothers. Having someone vouch for you is huge and will make you an actual contender as opposed to a random guy.

It’ll work out, trust me. I remember being super nervous but by some miracle I ended up exactly where I wanted. Good luck