One way to get firmly rooted in a new cultural soil is to join a student fraternity or sisterhood.
These student organizations are often mentioned in Hollywood films and English literature, but our student’s general idea of them is usually quite vague: Greek letters in different combinations, ridiculous ceremonies, a lot of alcohol, secret handshakes by which their own identify their own, bullying candidates for admission, beautiful girls from the cheerleading group. As a student, I didn’t join any of the communities, so I didn’t get help with my study from these organizations. Instead, I preferred to use essay maker, so I could improve my academic performance.
Real fraternity and sorority include all of the above and much more; these are real corporations with multi-million dollar budgets and their lobby in the government.
They deserve to be treated seriously, so before leaving, it is worth probing the ground for fraternities and sisterhoods of your university.
As Time journalist Charlotte Alter writes:
“There is an issue that is almost as important when applying to college as the financial capabilities and academic reputation of the institution. To be or not to be a “Greek”?
In some cases, you simply have no choice: at the University of Texas Pan-American, one hundred percent of female students are in a sorority, and ninety–nine percent of students are in a fraternity. Such an overwhelming advantage is rare, but even where fraternities are represented by a much smaller number of members, they still have a great influence on student life.”
How did fraternities and sisterhoods appear and what are they now?
The first “Greek brotherhood” arose for the same reasons that people continue to join them: because of the unwillingness to feel rejected and lonely. In 1776, John Hiff, a student at the College of William and Mary, who was not accepted into two Latin letter fraternities, decided to organize his community, with blackjack with Greek capital letters in the name. This is how Phi Beta Kappa appeared, a community organized according to the principle of Masonic lodges: with a test of newcomers, a solemn initiation ritual, secret signs by which their own recognize their own, and mandatory mutual support.
Then Phi Beta Kappa branches opened at other universities, and soon new fraternities appeared, with their own sets of letters. Sororities organized on the principle of fraternities appeared almost a century later, which is not surprising, given that women began to enroll in universities only in the middle of the nineteenth century. Sorority, of course, behaved much better than fraternity: on the one hand, women had to defend their right to study next to men, and the results less than brilliant were already counted as a defeat, on the other hand, students still tried to conform to the Victorian ideals of an “angel in the house”.
Members of sisterhoods and fraternities were considered (and for the most part were) the student elite. The Civil War suspended the development of fraternities, but after its end, the so-called Golden Age came, when existing student organizations were rapidly developing and new ones were being created. Fraternities and sisterhoods have become an integral part of American student life.
During the First and Second World Wars, fraternities were focused on helping military personnel – former students, generally being effective volunteer organizations.
After the Second World War, the fraternities acquired a pronounced army spirit; the trials of candidates for membership in the brotherhood “inherited” the cruelty and ingenuity of army hazing (although they were not distinguished by humanity before that).
The sixties almost killed the fraternities: the pacifism and individualism of the hippies did not go well with their traditions. But by the end of the seventies, the fraternities were back on the horse and continued their development up to the present.
Advantages of joining
The fraternities consisted of half of the US presidents, five out of ten businessmen of the current top 10 of Fortune magazine; a third of all Supreme Judges, and three-quarters of congressmen of the last convocation. The figures seem even more significant when you consider that members of the fraternity make up only four percent of the economically active population of the United States. The first female senator was a member of a Sorority.
A member of the fraternity almost triples his chances of successful graduation.
A Gallup survey of thirty thousand Greek graduates in 2014 showed that members of the fraternity and sorority in later life feel more satisfied with their work, place in society, and even health than those who were not in such communities.
