People in Greek life tend to say that living in your sorority house is the best experience of your college career. Here’s why I disagree.
When coming to UW–Madison, no one tells you that apartment leasing starts the first month of school. When it came up super fast and I asked my parents to co-sign a lease, they immediately said no because they thought it was too early. So, options were minimized to either living with strangers, in the dorms, or in my sorority house.
I decided to go for the third option. I knew some girls in the house, and I always heard it would be an amazing experience, so I thought, why not? However, this experience was not as amazing as everyone else said it would be.
For starters, most of my friends did not choose to live in the house. Though I have friends in the sorority, I also have friends who aren’t in the sorority, and most of them were living together. I came into the house only knowing two people well. And though I became friends with a lot of people that I met, I spent the whole semester juggling friendships and stressing myself out.
I felt like I wasn’t making new friends with people in the house or hanging out with my old friends enough. And to make matters worse, a lot of people in the house were all friends from the year before and came into the house with their friend groups, which made making new friends a lot harder.
Moving on, there were a lot of rules. And to make matters worse, I didn’t necessarily know many of them. I remember my second day, when I made a salad outside of dinner time and immediately got in trouble because it was a health hazard to touch the vegetables not during meal times. It’s not like the rules were unbearable; they were fine. But the existing ones did make some things hard.
Along with that, the drama was too much for me. I hate drama. I avoid it with a passion and never want to be a part of it. And even though I was not in the drama myself, even just hearing about it made me annoyed most of the time. I did not care about the random petty things.
And there were a few little random things that made it not the best experience, too. For starters, I spent most of the semester missing being able to cook, which sucked. All I wanted to do was cook, but without a kitchen I was unable to. I also had to walk quite a long distance to get to events like classes and club meetings, which also sucked.
Now, I don’t want this article to come off making it sound like it was terrible, because it was not. It was just something I did not enjoy as much as other people may have. And yes, I did prefer the dorms, for example. I was able to meet some amazing people, and the proximity to the Capitol made me much happier than I could have imagined. I also loved studying downstairs, and the chef’s food was truly delicious.
Reflecting back, overall, it was just what I had imagined, and I would have preferred to live elsewhere. However, I am glad I had the experience and the opportunity to live there.