Freshmen Move In

Five weeks and five days ago, the freshmen in front of Dupont began to stretch out of their cars, muttering one word answers to their beaming parents.  It was freshmen move in, and my team, the move-your-heavy-stuff team, the no-let-me-carry-that-up-three-flights-of-stairs-to-the-east-hallway team, was already sweating.  You see the shirts around campus and you think to yourself, "Self, I doubt that whatever those 'sweating for you' people did, that actually sweated that much.  Well we did.  And I, personally loved every minute of it.

And for a number of reasons.  One: this opportunity brought together fraternity men by splitting chapters up amongst all the groups.  So we all got to know someone from another fraternity and build the bonds of interfraternalism (and what better medium than sweaty manual labor?).  BTDUBS, shout out to my crew Andrew, Colin, Todd, and everyone else whose names I forgot.

But even more importantly, at least to me (as the Recruitment Chairman) was the beginning of recruitment.  Now this wasn't the kind of recruitment that you see starting later on in the semester, where individual chapters vye for individual prospective new members.  This was a fraternity system wide publication, saying to the incoming freshmen, guys and girls, "Fraternities at William and Mary may not be what you think.  We are here to help and make each other better men, and at least for those of us moving your crap, we have embraced the spirits of brotherhood and service."  Or something like that.

Not to say that it wasn't difficult, or that we didn't complain every five minutes about how hot it was.  But it definitely gave a whole batch of new students a different way to think of fraternities.  And if a little bit of sweat (ok, a whole lot of it) and some awkward introductions are all that it takes to give fraternities that kind of publicity, then I'm all in.

-Dan Crabtree

P.S. It was fun too, by the way.  Or at least I had fun.