The newly-formed Professional Fraternity Council held a recruitment fair in Baker Portico on Sunday, an opportunity for prospective members to get to know nine of the campus’s 11 pre-professional fraternities.
According to Kumar Nandanampati ’20, vice president of recruitment for PFC, the driving force behind the showcase was simple. “What can we do to make recruitment fair?”
The fair’s main goal was to present the fraternities in an “egalitarian manner,” according to Nandanampati. Attendees were encouraged to walk around and interact with current members and leaders from each organization.
The timing of the event was early in the semester, Nandanampati said, so that potential new members could familiarize themselves with all pre-professional organizations before any specific rush process began.
This idea of using the showcase to even the playing field seemed appealing, Akanksha Jain ’20 said, but Jain noted that there just weren’t enough people at the event.
“The fair was very poorly advertised,” Jain said. “No one knew about the fair besides brothers in fraternities.”
Jain said she thought that the concept behind the fair was good, although she believes its late execution limited its impact. According to Emma
The event kicked off PFC’s first active semester on campus and is one of many changes that the PFC intends to implement.
Nandanampati noted that when he met with other member organizations in December to plan, one main concern was the many differences between fraternities.
“There’s a lot of discrepancies here and there’s a lot of ways that they’re not very inclusive,” Nandanampati said.
To address issues of inclusivity, the PFC made changes to the organization’s applications. Applications now are required to include “very explicit” information asking about about financial need, physical accommodations, preferred gender pronouns and ethnicity.
That demographic information, Nandanampati said, will later be used to review whether there are significant differences between the demographics of applicants and those who are ultimately admitted.
“There’s just this idea that there’s no real authority over the professional fraternities,” Nandanampati said.
The nine fraternities include students interested in fields such as medicine, engineering, law and business. Last fall, the groups joined together to establish an umbrella organization, the Professional Fraternity Council. The role of the council is to establish standards across organizations and facilitate communication between the pre-professional groups.