How to Take Notes During Sorority Recruitment

Take notes after every single round, while the conversations are still fresh, because by day three of recruitment the houses blur together so badly that even prepared, type A PNMs can’t remember which chapter had the conversation they loved.

I’ve been in the basement of 40+ recruitments. (The basement is the back room where chapters debrief, score, and discuss PNMs after every round.) Note-taking is the thing RushTok doesn’t always coach PNMs on, and it separates the girl who walks into ranking her houses feeling in control from the one running on a foggy memory of 40 new faces. As someone who came into this world without the family playbook to lean on, it’s exactly the kind of thing I wish someone had spelled out early. Welcome to Notes from the Basement, fittingly enough. Here’s why notes matter more than you think, and why the chapters are already doing this to you too.

TL;DR

• The houses will blur by party three. Everyone swears they’ll remember. Nobody does.
• The chapters are taking detailed notes on you the second you leave, so doing it yourself isn’t paranoid, it’s what any smart girl would do.
• Do it right after each round while it’s fresh, not from memory three houses later.
• The what to take notes on is what most PNMs get wrong. My system lives in the Conversation Playbook.

Why You Won’t Remember (Even Though You’re Sure You Will)

You think you’ll remember. You won’t. I say that with love and a decade of watching it happen every recruitment.

Recruitment packs more new faces into a few days than most people meet in a month. Back-to-back conversations, sometimes five or six members a party, across multiple houses a day. The names and faces start blurring together almost immediately. By the time you’re sitting down that night trying to decide which house to rank higher, the conversation that made you light up has escaped your memory from the chapter it happened at.

That is not a you problem, and it is not a sign you weren’t paying attention. It’s just what volume does to a brain. The PNMs who end up guessing at rankings aren’t the forgetful ones. They’re the ones who trusted a memory that was never built to hold that much information at once.

The Chapters Are Taking Notes on You Too

Here’s the part that should make you feel a lot less silly about pulling out your phone between rounds.

The moment you walk out of a house, the evaluation starts. The members you just talked to are writing notes about you, and they are thorough about it. Us basement girls teach them entire systems of note taking. So when you take notes on them, you’re not being extra or weird. You’re doing the exact same thing they’re doing.

That reframe matters, because some PNMs can feel self-conscious about “keeping track,” like they should just remember what house they love. But when you’re drinking from a firehose of information and new faces, sometimes you just need to remember what conversation happened at what house.

Why How You Take Notes Matters More Than Whether You Do

Taking notes is easy. Taking the right notes is not. Most PNMs who diligently write something down after every party still end up with several paragraphs that feel productive in the moment, but does almost nothing for them when it counts - when they’re staring at their list trying to rank houses against each other.

The full version, what to capture so your notes actually earn their keep, how to structure each night so it sets up the next day, and how to keep yourself protected from the cutthroat aspect of rush while you do it, is all in the Conversation Playbook.

If You’re Already Spiraling About Doing This Right

Breathe. If you read all of that and your first thought was “great, one more thing to mess up,” hear me: notes are a tool to make you calmer, not another thing you need to be perfect at.

Prepping for recrutiment is how you walk in calm. And a girl who took 30 seconds for herself between rounds is walking in a whole lot calmer than the one who’s about to fake her way through remembering a conversation she genuinely can’t place.

You’ve got this.

If you want the rest of what chapters are actually evaluating start with my recruitment conversation tips, then go all the way in with the Conversation Playbook. It’s everything I’ve learned from 40+ recruitments, organized into something you can actually use the night before a round.