Growing Up at Dartmouth

Don't shed any tears for those doomed fraternities

Thirteen years ago, on a dismal Spring day, I received the crushing news that I would never become a sorority girl. Not a perfectly manicured Kappa Kappa Gamma nor a sporty Sigma Kappa; nor even a borderline-cool Kappa Alpha Theta. A shy freshman at Dartmouth College, I had been rejected by those vaunted sisterhoods in the first round of pledge-season cuts. Was it my clothes? Did I say something wrong? Now that I had officially been deemed an outcast like Hester Prynne, I sulked in my dorm room for days, convinced my social life was over before it had even begun.

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