New Year, New Look (Same Content!)

In this Issue: New Daily Deac format; Upcoming deadlines; Important health-related information as students return to campus; Sorority recruitment

New Daily Deac format

Happy New Year to all our Deac families! We are in the new year, and as promised, we are rolling out some tweaks to the Daily Deac. At the top each day will be In this Issue, so you can quickly see what I am covering. The In this Issue items will then appear as headers in the body of the message so you can skip to the section(s) you want. I may also have a quick intro each day under In this Issue, though I am still deciding. Rest assured that the general content of the Daily Deac will be the same, just hopefully easier to navigate.

Upcoming dates and deadlines

• January 7 – Residence halls open for all students on Saturday, Jan. 7 at 9 a.m. (Anyone approved for early arrival has received their move-in date.)

• January 8 – There is still time to enroll in the Dewar Tuition Refund Plan for spring 2023. This low-cost plan helps to minimize the financial loss when a student withdraws due to accident or illness. Learn more about the University’s Refund of Charges policy and how Tuition Insurance can assure up to 75% refund throughout the term. You can sign up for this plan until January 8, 2023.

Important health-related information as students return to campus

Students will be traveling back to campus soon, and as we look to the start of the semester, we want to keep the campus community as healthy as we can. As such, our Campus Health Committee sent students a message in late November encouraging them to take certain measures to stay healthy over break and for their return. Please encourage your Deacs to consider the following as they prepare to return to Wake:

• Wear a well-fitting mask on public transportation such as airplanes. Avoid taking your mask off in public places where people are unmasked.
• We encourage students to take a COVID-19 test within 72 hours before arriving on campus, as we have typically seen surges of COVID after breaks. Students who test positive should report their positive result to wfucovid@wfu.edu.
• Do not return to campus in January if you are actively ill:
  • For the flu, COVID, RSV, etc., remain at home or away from campus until your symptoms are improved and until you have not had a fever (without using fever-reducing medications) for 24 hours. Read more.
  • For gastrointestinal illnesses such as noroviruses, individuals may remain contagious for up to two days after their symptoms have resolved. Consequently, they should avoid returning to campus until that time.

Not coming to campus if you are actively sick is so important. With students living in a densely-populated environment, illnesses can spread easily. So if your Deac isn’t well, encourage them to postpone until they are no longer contagious (and be sure they communicate with their faculty members if they will not be here for the first day of classes).

Sorority recruitment

Some of our Deac families will have students going through sorority recruitment. This can be a highly emotional time for the Potential New Members (PNMs) and current sorority members, as well as the PNMs’ families. My colleagues in the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Life typically send an email to PNM families after each round of recruitment, recapping what has taken place and previewing what is coming next (see dates of the rounds here). But I’ll share a bit of what I know.

Initially, the PNMs meet all of our chapters so they can have exposure to all groups. After the first round, the mutual selection process begins: all PNMs will rank the chapters based on who they would like to get to know better, and the chapters also rank the PNMs based on who they are most interested in.

As each round of recruitment concludes, PNMs will be invited back to fewer chapter events as they and the chapters continue to submit their preferences and narrow down their options. During any given round, a PNM may find herself released by sorority she was interested in. Sometimes PNMs are “fully released,” which means they are not invited back to any of the groups (this is typically a very small group). While the goal of sorority recruitment is to place as many PNMs as possible, it is not a guarantee that a woman will receive a bid to join a chapter. 

When I talk to female students about the process, I do it with this visual.

Just for ease of explanation (and my poor math skills), imagine there are 400 PNMs. We have eight sororities. Each sorority will have a new member (pledge) class of approximately the same size; the recruitment process is built to place as many women as possible. But that does not mean every woman can join her top-choice chapter. 

As long as I have been at Wake, there has been an informal ranking of which sorority is perceived as the most desirable, and which are less so (though the most/least popular can change from year to year). But for argument’s sake, we might have 400 women who would love to be a member of the same one or two sororities, and that math doesn’t work. If you have 400 women vying for 100 spots, not every woman will get her first choice, or maybe even her second choice.

As recruitment progresses, it is not uncommon to have women who are not invited back to the sorority(ies) they wanted to be invited back to. Sometimes, when their feelings are hurt, PNMs withdraw from the whole sorority recruitment process, thinking “If I can’t be a [insert sorority name here], I don’t want to be anything at all,” assuming (wrongly, in my opinion) that they can only be happy in certain sororities and not others. If your Deac finds herself in this situation, please encourage her to pause before deciding to withdraw. Withdrawal can be a hasty decision she might later regret. 

I always urge PNMs to stick with the process and see it through. Don’t drop out if you don’t get invited back to your first or second choice of group. I am convinced that every single sorority has a wide range of sisters. They are not monolithic. There will be studious ladies and party ladies and people on both sides of the political aisle and from various states or religious practices, etc. in every single group. So in my mind it is a myth to think that you can only find sisterhood in certain groups. And like the Harry Potter sorting hat, women seem to land in the chapters they are well suited for if they will just trust the process. If they need it, PNMs can get support from one of the many resources available (their Greek Recruitment Counselor or GRC, her RA, the Counseling Center, etc.).

I wish all the PNMs good luck in the process. And hang in there, families who are living this from afar 🙂