Why I STAYED ADPi
When I first started thinking about going through primary recruitment, I just wanted to make friends, and everyone said that was an easy way to do it. I didn’t know anything about sororities, and I was a little skeptical at first. I figured I would try it out, meet some new people, and see how I felt about it after a year. Adpi took me by surprise. I thought the girls I met during recruitment were nice, smart, dedicated women who would make good friends, but nothing more than that. What I thought was the key to never having to go to the caf alone ended up being one of the most prominent parts of my college experience.
It didn’t start that way immediately. During my second semester of freshman year, I was no longer as excited about ADPi and was struggling to find my place. I no longer had the special treatment and feeling of being a new member, so it took some time to adjust. Freshman year, I had a small officer position but I didn’t really work with a lot of people through it so it wasn’t that impactful on my experience. Coming into sophomore year, I met and got closer with some older ADPi’s during recruitment that ended up being some of my very best friends and mentors to this day. Somehow I had gone an entire year without meeting Ansley Sanders, but fate (or Elizabeth O’dell) put us in the same group for recruitment and now I don’t know what I would do without her in my life. After recruitment, the rest of the semester was kind of mediocre in my ADPi experience. The events were fun, the friendships were great, but I craved something more out of this membership. I heard over and over how ADPi shaped people’s lives and made them grow so much as people, and I just hadn’t figured it out. Then came election season.
For the next year, my newly elected officer position was on the executive board, Vice President of Panhellenic Relations. While this specific position did not require a ton of my time or outside work, it allowed me to learn so much about how the chapter works. It gave me such a new appreciation for the organization I wanted to love so badly, but just hadn’t found my rhythm in. It gave me the opportunity to build relationships with other leaders in the chapter, being officers on the executive team or officers on the team I got to lead, as well as leaders in other chapters on Panhellenic Exec. Being any type of leader in an organization during 2020 was no walk in the park, but it was an experience I would not give back for anything. Being a younger member on exec, I got to learn so much from the older class and create friendships that I probably would not have otherwise. This year, in a new position of Vice President of Membership Experience, I’ve gotten to step into a more serious leadership role as a returning exec member and pour back into the chapter that has poured so much into me.
There were so many times I wondered what I was even doing in a sorority. None of my family has been involved in fraternities or sororities, so I wasn’t really sure what I was getting into. That first year, I kept wondering if this was the right thing for me or if I had made a huge mistake. At times, I wondered if it was worth it to continue. Looking back, I am so thankful that I jumped in blindly and just kept going. I knew there was something special about ADPi. I felt it during recruitment and the whole new member process, it just took me a little time to figure out what part of ADPi was special for me.
