SDT’s rush Bid Day.
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By Leyla Mercado, Asst. News Editor
Manhattan University’s Greek life organizations are back with an all-new rush this fall semester. The university’s two sororities and fraternities, Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity (DKE), Sigma Delta Tau sorority (SDT), Alpha Phi Delta fraternity (APD) and Alpha Pi Phi sorority (APP) are recruiting potential students in diverse ways.
Each organization discussed vital parts of their planning processes for rush alongside what’s to come for this semester. Bartu Balci, APD’s secretary, elaborated on how sudden changes have allowed the fraternity to evolve in ways that’ll make it worthwhile for potential new members.
“It takes a few months to plan and plus a lot of our guys are pretty busy,” Balci said. “The school had to cut back on our budget a lot. Last year our rush process was much longer, it was almost a month. We decided to cut it down to just over two weeks. Instead of having several events, we have less events but we make sure to try to get more people there. We feel that’d be more effective.”
APP’s efforts to maximize their impact for rush this semester is meant to bring in new potential members. Planning for rush includes theme creation, which APP decided on by aligning with the ideals of inclusivity.
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Siena DeMarco, president of APP, explained the organization’s theme and the process leading up to the main events.
“Our theme is baseball! We chose it because we did a charity softball game last semester and a lot of the girls had fun so we wanted to keep that consistent as a theme,” DeMarco said. “It’s nice for our current members as we just have a league of our own, like a girl baseball team.”
APP’s approach allowed all members to connect through various activities while looking their best in unique baseball gear.
This year, SDT took its theme to the next level, connecting it back to female empowerment – a concept that is essential within their organization.
Anna Schmidt, director of sisterhood, touched on what the theme means to SDT.
“We actually launched a new configuration of our brand as our slogan used to be ‘empower women’, we’re doing more of an all encompassing, ‘shine as one’ as our brand new logo,” Schmidt said. “The ‘shine as one’ is that when one individual member shines, we all shine. So, we’re empowering women and being an organization that uplifts.”
SDT uses their community to foster sisterhood, especially during rush in order to initiate a positive and uplifting environment amongst all women on campus.
With rush serving as a critical component of each organization’s recruitment, the building of relationships is inevitable as it sets the tone for what’s to come.
DKE highlights the significance of established brotherhood while maintaining its core values and longstanding ideals and objectives.
Jake Steinweiss, president of DKE, discussed what values truly matter to the fraternity.
“Specifically, over the last four years that I’ve been here, I’ve heard from all the guys that I’ve met that the bonds that we’ve created get stronger every single year,” Steinwiess said. “We’ve been in 30, 40 [person] groups and I’ve never seen a large group so close… I think that bond makes us so unique.”