Experience Within Organizations
Over the Summer I had the opportunity to intern at Enterprise Holdings, the structure at Enterprise was constant while I was there, but it was constant because it was structured well. What I really liked about the structure was the fact that it was well managed, every position had someone above them to act as a mentor and to be a leader. What this also meant was that there is ample opportunity for promotions within the company, with many different levels within an organization comes many chances for personal growth. I noticed this while I was there, people were always interviewing for better jobs, and this is only possible due to the structure they have.
On campus I am part of the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity, which has a very distinct structure. We have an executive board, which has various positions that handle different tasks. Each individual who is on the executive board has the job of forming a committee of people who help with doing the tasks of the job. A few examples of positions on the executive board are philanthropy, social, recruitment, secretary, as well as president. The recruitment chair is in charge of finding and bringing in new people to join, which is not an easy task. They have to be the right fit, and in order to target the right people it takes a lot of time. This is where the committee comes in to play, the leader of recruitment assembles a group of 10+ people to help him, they host events at the house to meet potential new members. When they have these events everyone on the committee networks, and once the event is over they have a meeting to talk about who was liked and or disliked. After lots of events and networking, the recruitment chair finds enough new members to join the house and his job is completed.
We have weekly meetings that we call chapter, at these the executive board is front and center, they talk about everything that is necessary to be accomplished for the week. After all the important business is handled the executive board opens the floor for general discussion, this allows for any member who wants to say something to have there voice heard. If people have anything to bring to the table, or anything to say at all they are given the opportunity to do so at this time. This structure is nice because it gives everyone the opportunity to help better the fraternity and have there voice heard. Something that has changed recently is that we don't allow potential new members to go to our pre games unless they commit to joining before hand. We do this so that people are joining for the right reasons; we want them to join for the brotherhood and not because of particular events. I think this is a great strategy as it allows us to really meet these people before giving them a bid to join the house.
On campus I am always striving to get a good grade in my courses, and to do so I need to have the right resources in order to succeed. Like for instance, I need to purchase the books, access codes, and proper school supplies. All of these goods I would consider to be transaction costs in the process of me getting a good grade. If I avoid these transaction costs the transaction (getting good grades) doesn't happen. The books (transaction costs) mattered because it is significantly harder for me to succeed without them.
The structure of this essay was a bit unusual in that the bulk of it was on your fraternity but then you had an opening paragraph about your internship and a closing paragraph about getting good grades in courses and these seem disconnected from one another rather than as part of a whole. Is there some connection between the internship and the fraternity? If so, could you bring that out? If not, maybe you don't need to discuss your internship in the piece at all but instead elaborate on the fraternity. (I will offer some thoughts on that below.)
ReplyDeleteFirst, I will ask the same sort of question about the connection between getting good grades and the fraternity. In other words, is there an academic side to fraternity membership? If so, that would have been good to discuss.
As you did go into some depth in discussing fraternity recruiting there are a few additional things you might have considered in this piece which would have fit and made it interesting to read. One is about your own experience being recruited. Did you know you wanted to be in a fraternity from the get go? Did you consider possibly being in another fraternity? Were you offered a chance to be in another fraternity? In other words, you could have personalized the issues your fraternity deals with by how they were managed in your own case.
The other pretty obvious way to extend this discussion is by noting there are many fraternities on campus and they all have to solve something of the same problem with regard to recruitment. So one question is whether fraternities differentiate themselves in certain ways to attract a certain type of student. Another question is whether in the overall market there is excess supply of fraternities looking for new student members or if there is an excess supply of students looking to join a fraternity.
Also, I am pretty ignorant about greek life so I am unclear about (a) being a member of a fraternity and (b) living at the fraternity. Somewhere I got it into my head that fraternities and sororities are different that way and that fraternities have many empty beds that they can't fill. I wonder if I have the story straight or not. In any event, considering the overall "market" would help in discussing the situation of your particular fraternity.
I agree that the structure was a bit odd, I wanted to hit on all of the potential points you brought up in the prompt. For that reason I talked about a school organization, as well as an organization I took part in outside of school, and lastly I talked briefly about transaction costs. It was unclear to me if you wanted us to pick one of those and talk about it in great detail, or if you preferred that we talked about each in slightly less detail, so I went the safe route and talked about all of them.
ReplyDeleteLooking into your first question, there is an academic side to being in my fraternity, if you do not maintain a certain GPA (above a 2.7) you are put on social probation. Social probation limits what events you get to go to, you will also be given a mentor in the house who will help guide you through the following semester. If your GPA is still below a 2.7 the following semester you can potentially be expelled from the fraternity. Another point worth mentioning here is that to gain membership into the fraternity there isn't a GPA check, essentially we take educated guesses on whether or not the kids we are asking to join will have a good GPA or not.
In terms of being recruited I was fairly certain that I did want to join a fraternity on campus. Me and my friends walked to different fraternities and would introduce ourselves to the ones that looked socially inviting. The ones that looked socially inviting were typically ones that has members outside, hanging around in front of the house. I did consider a few options and got asked to join multiple, but at the end of the day it came down to the people who I could see myself becoming the closest with. I really liked the fit at Sigma Phi Epsilon, everyone was smart and athletic, very well rounded individuals that I saw myself wanting to embody.
Also, I do believe that fraternities try and attract particular types of students, this is actually quite clear. As part of our recruitment, we bring potential members to play sport with us, we are trying to attract kids who have a passion for sports, which usually correlates to being well rounded. What I saw at other fraternities was trying to attract the kids who know how to talk to girls, kids that can drink a lot, or even kids who come from wealthy families. At the end of the day, each fraternity is looking for a particular type of person, when they find that person they offer them a bid to join them. I would also say that there is an excess supply of fraternities on campus to students who want to join, I know that there are many fraternities who have vacant rooms in their houses. This means they are having trouble finding an ample amount of students to join them. I know that sororities have a formal recruitment process, which might help eliminate vacant rooms, since the university is formally connected to that process. Also, there are only 19 sororities vs 40+ fraternities, it seems that the fraternity structure as a whole may be a bit unorganized and it certainly is not helping maximize it's potential.
I think you bring up a lot of great points in your blog. After reading it, actually, I saw a lot of similarities between our blog posts and experiences with organizations.
ReplyDeleteSomething else I realized with your post was that we had a similar struggle (of sorts) in describing our specific interaction with the greek community and kept the organization a bit more broad. I think that when discussing greek life in future which is a very foreign organization to many people, we will both need to cover our bases and make sure that we discuss all potential questions.
You mentioned transaction costs in terms of school and purchasing books, but I would be interested in hearing if you believe there are any transaction costs of joining greek life, in your situation a fraternity.
I would say that transaction costs are not essential for joining a fraternity but can be depending on who you were before college. Like for instance, in order to get into a particular fraternity you may have to embody a particular look, so some transaction costs could be buying clothing or getting the right haircut. However, if you already embodied that look those transaction costs could be avoided.
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