More than 300 students have accepted an offer to join (or “dropped a bid at”) one of Northwestern’s 16 fraternities, as Saturday marked the official end of fraternity Rush Week.
This year’s numbers did not break any records, but fraternities can still submit additions to their new member classes until Feb. 6, according to an e-mail sent by the Director of Fraternity and Sorority Life, Dominic Greene. Last year, 346 men became new fraternity members.
For Tom Koerner, Zeta Beta Tau’s rush co-chair, this week was a success.
“It was a long haul, but we’re really satisfied with the guys we have,” he said. ZBT finished Rush Week with 34 new members, the most pledges of any fraternity this year. According to Koerner, this is roughly the same amount of pledges ZBT has had in the past several years.
“I know that when people get the final numbers, it looks like it’s a lot of guys, and people think that we’re just handing out bids,” Koerner said. “But we put a lot of work and effort into our rush process and at the end of the day, what we do is try to find the most compatible pledge class possible, and [34] is the number we ended up with.”
But other fraternities weren’t quite as successful. Chi Phi, a fraternity consisting of 14 members, didn’t recruit any new members during Rush Week, something Chi Phi president Andrew Lang said was partially due to his fraternity’s temporary eviction from their house. Chi Phi had no choice but to hold their Rush Week events in Kemper Hall.
“We recently got an Evanston city ordinance, and our house got closed down, so that probably played a pretty big role,” Lang said. “Other than that, with low numbers, it’s tough to meet as many people as bigger frats.”
For many new pledges, joining a fraternity was not something they had always considered.
“When I was looking for schools, a school that didn’t really have that many fraternities was a good thing for me,” Weinberg freshman and ZBT pledge Jared Von Halle said. “But I ended up here, and I guess talking to some of the older kids who were in fraternities, and how it wasn’t just a place for parties […] and then getting to see for myself at the fraternities, I thought I could fit pretty well into the scene.”
Todd Siegel, also a Weinberg freshman and ZBT pledge, agreed.
“Especially at Northwestern, because it’s an academic powerhouse, a lot of guys come here really not knowing if they want to do a fraternity, or really thinking that they don’t want to,” he said. “That’s the case at ZBT and probably at a lot of places too, probably half the house originally didn’t plan on doing a fraternity.”
Siegel added that he liked having rush during Winter Quarter, as opposed to at the beginning of the academic year.
“You get three full months, basically, to go to all the different fraternities,” he said. “So I pretty much spent all of Fall Quarter getting to know all the guys and knowing which houses I liked, which houses I didn’t, so when Rush Week started, I had pretty much narrowed it down to this house.”