Greek Week, one of the largest events on campus, took place about two weeks ago. All of the sororities and fraternities from the Inter Fraternal Council (IFC), National Panhellenic Conference (NPC) and the National Panhellenic Council (NPHC) were invited to participate in the campus-wide event.
Sophomore Chase Gibson acted as the coordinator for Spring 2012's Greek Week and is a member of Kappa Sigma. He stated that "Greek Week was a competition between all of the fraternities and sororities on campus and consisted of various physical and creative activities.” These activities ranged from tug-of-war to who could build the best house.
Greek Week has been going on since 1997 and was founded by the second and third established fraternities on CSU's campus: Kappa Sigma and Sigma Nu. Since then, Greek Week has been a firmly established tradition.
According to Gibson, the biggest and most successful event from Greek Week was the Variety Show that took place on Wednesday, April 18. The Variety Show was designed to allow any of the sororities or fraternities to display their various talents within their organization in the form of song, playing the guitar, a skit, rap, dance etc.
Four fraternities from the IFC performed (Kappa Sigma, Sigma Nu, Tau Kappa Epsilon and Pi Kappa Alpha), two sororities from the NPC (Phi Mu and Delta Zeta), and one sorority and one fraternity from NPHC (Alpha Phi Alpha and Alpha Kappa Alpha). Phi Mu went home with first place and Delta Zeta took second place.
When asked what his favorite aspect of Greek Week was, Gibson mentioned the Variety Show mainly because "it gave the sororities and the fraternities free reign to display their creativity.”
Besides displaying creativity, Gibson hopes that in the future Greek Week will be able to give more exposure for Greek life on campus and in general allow for more participation from non-Greeks. He went on to explain that compared to other schools CSU does not have a large Greek presence.
The lack of enthusiasm towards Greek life on CSU's campus has been blamed on a number of reasons and largely because of common misconceptions about the Greek system. When asked what he felt was a common misconception about the Greeks on campus, Gibson replied "that all we do is drink.” He went on to explain that Greek organizations are some of the few organizations that put in the most philanthropy hours. Gibson's fraternity, Kappa Sigma, hosts one of the largest philanthropy events on campus known as "Shave to Save” an event done to raise awareness for breast cancer research.
In addition, Kappa Sigma recently won the Best Chapter award at their Southeast Leadership Conference, Dixie Conclave. There were 24 other chapters in the running for the award from Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Tennessee. Kappa Sigma is known for standing on their four pillars of fellowship, leadership, scholarship and service.
Their high achievement just goes to show you that the Greek organizations on our campus stand for more than just participating in fun activities but also focuses on building a legacy of leaders.
Greek Week, however, was done simply for fun and the outcome does nothing more than just give a sorority and fraternity bragging rights. More importantly though, Greek Week allows African American and Caucasian fraternities and sororities to come together and embody their slogan "No matter the Letter: We're all Greek together.”
Overall, Greek Week was a huge success and based upon the large turnout, the students will certainly be anticipating its return next spring semester.
