| The university is composed of several different colleges, in a formal education alliance. Fraternities and sororities are a separate college, in an informal alliance. They offer their own courses, for which you pay them tuition directly, instead of through the university bursar. They have their own admission requirements. Here is a sampling from their course catalog: FSS (fraternity and sorority system) 101 - Finding Your Clique
FSS 102 - Building Common Experiences Through Hazing
FSS 103 - Introduction to Social Hierarchies
FSS 104 - Basic Social Interactions
FSS 201 - Party Management
FSS 202M - Informal Rules of the Brotherhood
FSS 202F - Informal Rules of the Sisterhood
FSS 203 - Essential Duties of the Wingman
FSS 204 - Hooking Up and Cockblocking Awareness
FSS 301 - Organizational Public Relations (Shut Your Mouth, Bro)
FSS 302 - Advanced Pranking
... Just think of it as a school devoted to the practical study of human interactions, based loosely on the apprenticeship model. The right fraternity or sorority will teach you how to get more out of life with less effort. The downside is that it produces a lot of illusory conformity. There are plenty of people who don't even like Natty Light and football; that's just the center of gravity and safe fallback for their social interactions. A guaranteed safe common cultural basis is essential for knitting together a lot of disparate personalities into one social club. That is a form of systems hacking, albeit one that many of us may have trouble recognizing, because we are more accustomed to hacking things that aren't people. If you can find common interests with a "bro", you can have perfectly normal interactions with them. But they have already established a default among themselves, wherein they can skip the awkward protocol handshakes and acquaintance-building exercises, and jump right to the profitable social interactions. This doubles as a rudimentary trust network to support immediately elevated privileges. (I am not a "bro", but I have an outsider's understanding of the system.) |
Yep, pretty much how I viewed it the entire time. I had no friends in a new town, and it bothered me (this doesn't bother everyone and that's fine). I needed a quick hack so I didn't have to worry about it for years to come. It worked great, but I'm sure there were other ways to tackle the problem.