informal recruitment

Informal recruitment is a beast in it's own right. My first suggestion is to contact the PHA advisor and let them know that you want to informally rush. My second piece of advice is to make friends with girls on your floor that are a part of sororities because having friends in a house makes COB much easier. Third piece of advice, keep your grades up. It will help you immensely if you have stellar first semester grades for college.

COB is not a guarantee but plenty of women have found their homes through COB. Though I suspect if you dropped because you weren't happy with your choices, you won't like COB. "Top tier" houses don't COB. You might need to rush as a sophomore if you want another swing at houses you love.

The best things you can do, whether you end up COBing or rushing as a sophomore are these two things.

1. Keep your grades up. Seriously, this is the most important one.

2. Join a club outside of greek life. It makes you look better on paper.

3. Make friends with girls in sororities. They'll help you out when cuts are made.

Good luck <3

No one knows what the rules are for COBing or spring rush. The best houses don't do either, so if your goal is to get into a top house, that's probably not going to happen. Plus, you can contact houses and express your interest and never hear back. So it's all a mystery and a fairly suspicious one at that because who knows if discrimination goes on. Good luck to you, but you might be better served by making outstanding friends in the dorm and planning to stick with them when it comes to living choices the next several years.

Look at the spring sorority grades list, you get an idea of how many new girls were taken by each house

barely any of the houses included new members in their GPA lists.

I was a transfer student and did informal recruitment and it was the best decision I made, however it does help to know people in the house

The options you didn't like during formal rush are likely to be the only ones you have during COB (if they're even interested in you).

Top houses rarely are below total and any open slot usually is filled very discreetly by bff's of actives.

Your best option is to have a flawless freshman year and re-rush next fall. To do that, you need to figure out exactly why you didn't have a successful rush this year- do you need to work on conversation, build your resume, get more/better recs, improve your wardrobe/personal appearance, raise your GPA, etc. You also need to really focus on making friends with girls who are in the houses you're interested in as they will be the ones who can round up the votes for you next year.