It's rush week, which means that for the next few days, every single girl on campus will experience some form of an identity crisis. Could anything be more exciting than joining a house that spent the last week engaged in an institutionalized form of cattiness? There's something about rush that temporarily changes people men and women in ways that we haven't seen the likes of since the first season of Jersey Shore. In an attempt to play the roles of real people with interesting lives and real things to talk about, many potential new members achieve complete physical transformations, polish their small talk repertoire and may even end up alienating the group of friends they've had since freshman year. In some ways, your life morphs into a weird reality television version of its former self think the Real World, Shark Week and a little bit of The Bachelorett. They're all captivating, psychologically complex experiments that display humans under extreme pressure to perform in an unnatural setting.
I talked to a nervous female '14 who plans to rush this fall, whose immediate reaction to the word "rush" was a crazed, wide-eyed gaze that was both a mix of fascination and paranoia that I was in some way testing her. Before answering a few of my questions, PNM "x" looked around to make sure that no upperclassmen and none of her friends were around to hear her explanation of why all of her friends had become insane bitches in less than 24 hours. PNM "x" then proceeded to enumerate every #whitegirlproblem that I could conceive: My dresses scream "slut" not "sister," what do I wear during the dress-code-ambiguous round two, fear of "sorority jaw" from trying to smile for extended periods of time. Rush turned into Pandora's box for this girl after an incident that she said really made her question the psychological effects of rush on her friends and even people she didn't know.
"I walked into my friend's room, and I saw someone in there pacing very slowly, so I asked what she was doing," she said. "The girl responded that she had read somewhere that walking slowly made you look more confident, so she wanted to practice looking confident before rush."
After a bit more chatting and of course, a denunciation of adjusting one's walking pace to a slower speed (side note: faster walking makes you look more confident since it appears as if you have places to go; do not whip out this move until round three), PNM "x" spotted her friend walking by and summoned her opinions on the recent psychosis of the other '14 females. Her opinion was that it was an incredibly over-blown process that too many people believed had ramifications that would determine the vitality of their social lives for the rest of their time at Dartmouth. Micromanaging your appearance and engineering social pleasantries seemed to be a comical way to gain membership to a house, especially if you end up transforming into a frazzled tranny with an insane second personality. The friend added that it had ironically changed how she interacted with her good friends after their discovery of her relative apathy to the entire process.
"Some girls are convinced I have my eye set on one house and that's why I am pretending that I don't care, but that's really not the case," she said. "What really surprised me, though, was how a lot of my friends have been backpedalling on statements they made last year about houses as if they feel like they are withholding top-secret information."
That really made me think why would you lie to your friends, especially if the chances are high that you would be in the same house? This inevitably leads me to an extended metaphor involving Harry Potter, but I will spare you the details. Rush isn't a cosmic sorting process that identifies your soul and places you into some pre-determined house. Harry would have been fine in Slytherin. The most tangible lesson of this story is that you shouldn't be caught dead wearing a hat during rush.
Everyone is nervous about rush, even the upperclassmen. For some reason, as PNM "x" put it, there is an intense apprehension about it that intensifies astronomically the days beforehand. Perhaps the anxiety is directly proportionate to the increase in how many Greek letters a sorority sister can manage to have on her outfit the days before rush. Although rush doesn't begin until this afternoon, PNM "x" said she finds it really difficult to even talk to upperclassmen without being hyper-conscious of every word that comes out of her mouth or even being paranoid about whether the impromptu stare-down that she just experienced from the president of some sorority on FFB was intentional. The friend of PNM "x" said that she thinks that a lot of girls mask their insecurities so well around men, but they become their most vulnerable around other women.
Finally finding out what house you are in, if the process runs smoothly, is maybe the most underwhelming thing ever. Do I call my parents or is it not really considered an accomplishment? Perhaps your bid night put the "bid" in "biddy" or maybe it seemed like the trailer for the sequel of "How to Lose Friends and Alienate People." The girl that sits next to you in class is your "sister," so do you have to say hi now? There are so many new things to adapt to, strangers to greet and so many new things that you feel stupid for not knowing. Who would ever have guessed what 'tails stood for? Also, you can forget about that 10A on Thursday.
One of my closest friends, who I met through my sorority, said she remembers the anxiety of bid night and looking around the room and thinking, "Are these my 100 new best friends?" Spoiler alert: Absolutely not. You might never talk to some of the girls, but maybe a few will be your bridesmaids or your roommate over sophomore Summer.
