FluxBlog

Fellow Cornellian and the idea of Fall rush is very, very strange to me as well. I also didn't rush, but I decided that *after* having a full semester to get sense of what role the frats and sororities played on campus, make some friends and discuss their plans with them, and just generally get a sense of things. I can't imagine trying decide something like that essentially sight unseen.

I've found this to be bewildering enough that I've actually talked about it with a few people that went to other schools (who are usually equally bewildered by the idea of Spring rush). My half-baked theory is that the difference basically comes down to how diffuse the Northeastern elite is education-wise compared to what happens at a school like Alabama--rich kids in New England or the Mid-Atlantic go to any one of eight Ivies, a dozen SLACs (Williams, Amherst, etc.), and a whole array of only slightly less exclusive privates, fancy publics, and/or preppy safety schools (Tufts, UVA, and Hobart, respectively, are the examples in my head). Even if you went to an elite prep school, unless there's a building at Harvard named after your grandfather, you don't really know where you're going to college until shortly before you go. Andover still sends a TON of people to Yale every year, but that means 5% of their class, not the numbers you would see at a fancy private school in Alabama or Georgia and their respective state flagships (they send half as many kids UMass and none to UConn). All of that means that you simply can't learn the intricate details of the social structures of every relevant school before you go; even for the children of the elite you're not going to be able to chat up your best friend's mom about what house or club to join, after all you're going to Penn and she went to Wellesley. And when you show up on campus you'll *maybe* know a handful of kids from your class or that preceded you by a year or two, but the networks are just very, very different.

On a lighter note, it's funny to me that Kappa is Kappa everywhere apparently, even if at UA that means blonde rich girls from Mobile and in Ithaca its brunette St. Paul's grads driving Audis (dying your hair is (was?) for new money and southerners, they would never).

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