This week, eligible Colgate students will be participating in sorority and fraternity recruitment. Colgate’s Greek organizations uniquely participate in a delayed recruitment process, which means that students are not eligible to participate in recruitment until the fall of their sophomore year. This delay is intended to give students time to form their own connections and experiences before deciding whether or not they want to go through recruitment and, if so, which organization they might wish to join.

Sorority recruitment is a particularly organized process, referred to formally as Colgate’s Panhellenic Association Recruitment 2018. The National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) is the governing body for all nationally recognized sororities, and all of the members of Colgate’s three recognized chapters on campus are members of the Panhellenic Association, which formally coordinates recruitment each fall. These three chapters include Delta Delta Delta, Gamma Phi Beta and Kappa Kappa Gamma.

Sorority Recruitment 2018 kicked off on Tuesday, September 11 and will conclude on Sunday, September 16 with a celebratory Bid Day. Throughout the process, the Panhellenic community provides each person who registers with a trained Recruitment Counselor to guide them through the process. These Recruitment Counselors are sorority members who “disaffiliate” from their chapter for the duration of recruitment in order to provide unbiased support and guidance to those going through the process.

This year, Tristan Hilpert is Colgate’s new Assistant Dean of Students and Director of Fraternity and Sorority Advising. Hilpert says he has taken a new approach to recruitment this year by providing more intensive training for Recruitment Counselors.

“We did a lot more training this year. We did online training as well as in-person training, so it’s more than in previous years. I believe they used to have limited in-person training. This year we had three in-person trainings as well as online training over the summer, and that curriculum was created by our Panhellenic Executive Board,” Hilpert said.

Hilpert says he wants to make sure that he takes time this year in his new position to observe the process before making any significant changes.

“I’ve been taking notes through this entire process, and we’re tweaking things as we go,” Hilpert said. “We will also be doing a full review of recruitment afterwards. We will do focus groups, we will do meetings and we will probably do some sort of survey or assessment. We want to hear from current chapter members, chapter leadership and potential new members. In the future we will build a lot more of this into the process, surveying everyone who goes through it.”

Hilpert says that recruitment is not only an isolated fall event. He says he wants to discuss recruitment throughout the academic year in order to improve it for the following year.

His perspective of looking at recruitment as a year-round process departs from the traditional view that it is only relevant in the fall.

According to Hilpert, the goal of the new intensive training, as well as the future review process, is to ultimately provide a better experience for everyone involved in recruitment.

“I think we put together an excellent training program this year, which is exciting because we can move forward more successfully and efficiently with our recruitment process. The process is for our potential new members and so we want to provide them with the best experience possible,” Hilpert said.

It is approximated by chapter leadership that 380 Colgate students will be going through the recruitment process this year, for both sororities and fraternities.

Contact Karrie Spychalski at [email protected].