Olivia Proffit
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Due to an increased student interest in sorority life and the large sizes of some chapters, Cal Poly is inviting two more sororities to join existing Panhellenic Association (PHA) sororities within the next few years to alleviate stress on existing chapters.
Which chapters are coming to campus is still unknown.
Cal Poly’s admission numbers have grown over the past few years, but female enrollment has remained relatively the same, Coordinator of Fraternity and Sorority Life Travis Roberts said. Regardless, the number of women interested in sororities has increased.
With this increase, chapters may have a difficult time accommodating every girl in the house and finding areas large enough to hold chapter meetings or social events, Roberts said.
Large numbers also make it difficult to give each sorority member individual attention.
“With large pledge classes, we can’t really focus as much attention on every single person individually,” animal science senior and Vice President of Panhellenic Affairs Lauren Leahy said.
According to Durante, adding one or two more houses would fix this problem, as well as decrease the number of girls each house accepts during recruitment, give more opportunities for leadership positions, make it easier to house women at the chapter houses and give the women a better chance to get to know each chapter member.
“I think it’s an awesome opportunity to grow the organization; the houses can level out,” Durante said. “The girls will get to know more girls in their chapter.”
Cal Poly began the process of inviting new sororities the beginning of fall quarter. It’s a collaborative process between Cal Poly and national sororities. According to Roberts, the process has several steps:
- To determine if there is a need for more sororities, an exploratory committee forms to look at population data from the past five years.
- If the committee sees the need, they make a recommendation to Cal Poly’s PHA.
- PHA decides whether they want to bring in more sororities.
- If they do, the National Pannhellenic Conference (NPC) is notified and they report Cal Poly’s invitation to all national sorority headquarters.
- Interested sororities will send packets of information to Cal Poly to be reviewed by the exploratory committee
- The committee will invite a few sororities to campus and ask them to conduct a presentation. After presentations, the committee decides whom to bring to campus.
According to Leahy, PHA recently decided they want to invite sororities to campus. The next step is contacting NPC.