The confused international student is back! Daily Editor Youngweon Lee explains the fraternity rush process as seen by her, a clueless foreigner. 

tfw a potential future SCOTUS got his start at Fiji

This process is a lot longer than the sorority rush process, because it feels like people are rushing or pledging for months every semester. You get to choose which fraternity you rush, and you can rush multiple and if you get bids, you can accept or refuse. (You can obviously only accept one bid.) There are open rush events that every fraternity has, and you have to start there. You may or may not get invited back to the subsequent invite-only events depending on how much the fraternity people (brothers?) like you.

There are multiple invite-only rush events, and they’re Hunger Games style survival competitions of sorts. Basically, there are two different ways of going about this. One is that the rushes drink continuously for a certain period of time, and whoever is left alive and conscious at the end of the time period makes it to the next round. The other is that they have a quota, and when a certain number of people remain alive and conscious, the competition stops and they make it to the next round. Alternatively, a bonus round might include a competition of how-many-beers-can-you-drink-before-you-throw-up and how-intimidatingly-can-you-ask-if-you-have-an-invite.

After a few rounds of these competitions, the rushes that survive to the end get a “bid.” Again, kind of like an auction. They don’t come in nice envelopes like sororities, though. Usually what happens is that they put the rushes in a room individually and tell them they didn’t get the bid, to see how sad they get (i.e. how worthy they are). If they get really sad, the fraternity brothers (?) come to the room and congratulate them on being accepted to the fraternity. Then, the rushes become pledges.

As pledges, prospective members of a fraternity have to do really stupid things as part of their “initiation.” One that I’ve seen is to wear a little Hello Kitty backpack around campus. There are also some secret rituals that are specific to each fraternity and resemble religious ceremonies or satanic worship rituals. I can’t go into detail because this is all very secret, but rumor has it that one fraternity sometimes draws special patterns on the basement floor of their house and sacrifices a live goat. (Then eats it in a goat curry.) Sometimes they have to steal cups from sororities. They also have to re-prove their liver capacity and demonstrate how much shitty beer they can stomach. The initiation activities exist so that pledges can prove their loyalty to the fraternity before they become official “brothers.”

Pledges don’t actually get kicked out as long as they do all the initiation activities. At this point it’s just a matter of their own choice. After they complete these activities, which may take months or an entire semester depending on the fraternity, they become official members of the fraternity. Very lit.

Nice Job Fiji via The Nation