Let’s be honest: The sorority recruitment process can be complicated and confusing. With different names for all the rounds of rush, the process for getting your schedule every day, and all the different terms being thrown around all the time, it feels like you never really know what’s even going on half the time. Especially if you’re unfamiliar with rush and don’t know anyone who has gone through it before, it can seem like a strange code that needs to be decrypted.
It really doesn’t help that different schools can use different terms for the same concepts. But if you do some research on some common rush terms and what the different rounds entail, it can make the entire process much easier, especially if you take it step-by-step.
One of the terms I’ve been seeing on RushTok and other social media lately has been the “snap bid.” And here’s the thing: I’m *in* a sorority and had literally never heard this term before. I wanted to understand what people were talking about, so I did some research on the term, to hopefully help ease your recruitment research process.
So, what is a snap bid? According to TikToker Claire-Lise Greve, snap bidding is a super last-minute way for a sorority house to offer you a bid. This can only happen during the formal sorority recruitment process — specifically, it happens right before bid day, after sororities have already picked all of the PNMs they want to offer bids to.
Why do snap bids exist, you ask? The thing is, most sorority chapters have to meet a quota — aka, number of new members they need to offer bids to — every rush season. These numbers can be defined by a few different entities, such as the chapter itself, or the national branch of the sorority, or even sometimes the college where the sorority is. Most sororities do this because of financial reasons; if you don’t have enough members to pay dues, you don’t have enough money to exist.
Essentially, snap bidding occurs when a house has made its list of everyone they want from their final round of rush — aka, Preference round — and they are under quota for new members to offer bids to. So, the house will look through the list of women who have not been offered bids during rush (either because they withdrew from rush or was dropped by all the sorority houses during the process) and offer bids to their top choices from that group. Yes, even if those women did not “Pref” that sorority.
Overall, snap bidding tends to be relatively rare, because most chapters tend to be able to meet their quotas pretty easily during recruitment. And some schools might not even do it at all, so this is definitely not something to rely on during rush — but still, the more you know, the better!