Sunday afternoon might look like Panhellenic recruitment came early: freshman women will be lead from chapter house to chapter house in the second annual Panhellenic Council Open House.
The pre-recruitment education program, which won DePauw's organization a national Membership Recruitment Award, is the first opportunity for freshman women to be on Panhel-affiliated chapters' grounds.
From 2 p.m. to 4:05 p.m., the women will move among each of the six houses to converse with upperclass women, who will be assigned to populate other houses and instructed to not reveal which chapter they are members of. At the first three houses visited, two freshman women will be paired with two greek women to discuss one of three Panhellenic values — service, sisterhood and scholarship — for 10 minutes. Groups will tour the first floor of every house they visit.
"First and foremost, the first-year women will get a chance to talk to upperclass women and get more information about what it's like to join the greek community, like what the benefits are of joining a sorority," said senior Lauren Messmore, vice president of recruitment for Panhel. "First-years aren't allowed on sorority property until after fall break, so it's like a little sneak peak into the house."
Greek women will have "cheat sheets" of information to present to freshman women during their 10 minute conversations to show why being greek matters. As anonymous chapter members, they'll speak from general knowledge of DePauw's greek scene.
"For example," Messmore said, "Scholarship — we'll talk about how the women who are a part of the greek community have higher GPAs than women who are not a part of the community at DePauw. For sisterhood, we'll talk about bonding activities some chapters do. For service, we'll talk about the philanthropies that each chapter does."
Messmore hopes this year will prove to be even more successful than last, having evaluated what went well and what didn't last year.
The most noticeable changes were the conversations, which were downsized from 20 minutes to 10. The event will be more closely executed time-wise. Otherwise, the open house remains largely the same in hopes it will have a similarly positive impact to last year.
"We did the open house to replace mingles and the overall consensus was that they were more productive," said Wendy Wippich, a Panhel advisor and assistant director of Campus Living and Community Development. "What's most important, besides the award we won, is that the women outside of the organizations learn a lot about greek life. We hope it gives an idea of what it means to be part of our Panhellenic community."