Paying for Your Friends or Furthering Your Future?

by Amanda Kurtz (section 01, Spring 2011)

College is the first time when young people are away from their home environment, family and close friends. This brings upon many choices for college students to make, most pertaining to the life after college, i.e. the “real world”. The real world and even worse the job market these days is scary and competitive. So how can your time in college, outside of the classroom help you further your career and help you land the job you have always wanted? It is not just the long hours in the library, the countless all-nighters, the long seminars and good grades that are going to help you further your career; it is something else that you may not think of. Have you ever seen the girls on campus, wearing their embroidered Greek letters on their shirts trying to raise money for the local homeless shelter or some other type of charity? What you may not realize is that they are more than just pretty girls with nothing better to do with their time. Instead, their sisterhood just may be the ticket to your dream job. Sororities are more than letters on a jacket, monogrammed rings, jeweled badges and secret rituals. Joining a sorority means gaining a powerful sisterhood bong, circle of life-long friends, rewarding volunteer work, resume boosters, scholarships and leadership positions built into a circle of career networking opportunities.

To analyze the decision to join a sorority or any other Greek organization and the benefits that encompass such as decision, one can look at this decision from an economic standpoint, using the opportunity cost decision-making model. Using this type of decision making process, one can compare the accounting costs, or the monetary value of which surround such a decision and compare them to the opportunity costs, which is the assessment of not only the material resources associated with the decision, but also the value and worth of the resources. Overall, it is simply examining the next “best thing” and what you are giving up. In decision-making, assessing opportunity costs helps to give a true assessment of the choice you are facing. In this case, the decision would be to join a sorority, therefore our opportunity costs would examine all of the things that we would be given up if we did not join and compare them to the monetary resources used. Therefore the accounting costs for joining a sorority would be, paying dues along with paying for other things such as philanthropy events, formals tickets and social mixers. Considering this, we can compare them to the opportunity costs, which would mainly include the loss of free time and the money that you would have had if you did not have to pay dues. Therefore, using this type of decision-making model, it is clearly seen that losing some extra free time in your schedule and a little bit of cash in your pocket is worth it in the end. In the end, you would be gaining of a group of sisters, building up your résumé, developing time management skills, giving back to the community, receiving scholarship money and your gained leadership skills to make yourself more marketable for a job.

From personal experiences, being a member of a sorority teaches you so many skills that cannot be learned within a classroom. Between managing your schoolwork, with sisterhood events and participating in philanthropic endeavors, one can see that your time in college is more than a representative of your GPA. In the end, these things will prove to employers that you spent your time in college doing more than simply going to class, but rather actively taking steps to better yourself and further your future. The stigmas and stereotypes that come with sororities and any other Greek organization will always be there along with the saying, “you are simply paying for your friends”, but if that is how they saying goes, than frankly I do not think that you are paying enough.