I wasn’t sure if I was even going to rush because financially it was going to be hard, and college was already going to be a lot. I didn’t think it was even going to be worth it. I thought joining would be something I would never recommend to someone and I would kind of regret. Now, whenever someone asks,  I recommend rushing, especially to the people that are still in Antioch.  It was an opportunity I wouldn’t trade for anything.

I was so happy when this opportunity came up where I could help make a chapter at NIU. This was unlike any other opportunity I have experienced; we could make our own rules and our own prices; we got to do the process that goes with building a chapter-all of that stuff by ourselves. Everyone could just bounce new ideas off each other and we all used each other to make the fraternity life as a whole better.

At first, other fraternities didn’t really think highly of us because we were the newest fraternity on campus. They didn’t like us coming in on their turf, but that negative influence just  put the ice in our veins. We pushed ourselves to have a lot of fun and make the experience our own. We had to work with all these new people that hadn’t been in greek life before and make them leaders. We are unique in the fact that we have some upperclassmen on our executive team, but we even have a freshman on that team as well. While that is intimidating for the underclassmen, they have brought so many new ideas and have helped with so much to make our fraternity that much better. This idea that we could respect underclassmen and upperclassmen has helped us bond.

Just by being in the fraternity, I made so many new friends; I had 53 new friends after we finished rushing. It is truly a brotherhood; we instantly became friends and brothers.  They’re so encouraging. We’re always supporting each other to join intramurals, join a club, join the sports teams. If there’s  anything  one of our guys wants to do, we all support each other.

School is included. We just started in November and we’re the third highest GPA in all of greek life at NIU. The nationals called us and told us they thought it was fake and they had to check our numbers again because of  how high they are and how new we are. We aren’t completely official yet and we are already showing how well we can do.

By “not official,” I mean that we’re still in the process of getting chartered, or recognized nationally, and getting accepted by all the other fraternities on campus. Like everyone on campus knows who we are, but we haven’t been recognized by the national organization as a chapter on our campus yet.

Even though we aren’t nationally recognized, we try our best to be the best we can, we tell our guys to really hustle and we focus on our school work. We all aren’t perfect, we don’t expect everyone to be, but we try to stay away from some of the negative stereotypes of fraternities. It isn’t like we force our guys to stay completely away from partying, but we tell them that if you work hard you can still go out and have fun. We don’t have a house yet so we can’t throw parties. We are still searching for a house, not just to throw parties, but the house will truly help to establish ourselves as a chapter and help us become more well known throughout the community and nation.

We’re encouraging our members to try to be active in the community, to get ourselves more known and to make our image more how we feel we are as people and as a fraternity.

To help with that, we definitely want to do a lot more charity work and encourage each other to be more like philanthropists. It feels like a big goal right now, but we’re already starting to take it on little by little. Right now we took a big step by starting to work with five charities to help their cause. We’re definitely going to look more into being at more social events with them and supporting them in our community. We just want to help our NIU community in general.

We’re working to be the best we can be in all areas. We don’t want to be the newest fraternity on campus, but the best fraternity we can be.