What a Spider in Kansas Taught Me About Taking Control of a Rush Conversation

I want to tell you about a sophomore at Gamma Phi Beta and the daddy long legs that ruined our entire conversation.

I was a freshman at the University of Kansas. It was my second day of recruitment. It was hot and muggy in the way only Kansas in August can be. I had survived Open House and felt, for the first time all week, a tiny flicker of confidence. I had made my first round of cuts. I had been invited back. I was walking into Gamma Phi, which at KU is a strong chapter, and the woman who came to the door to walk me inside was, I realized later, just a regular sophomore who probably did not yet know what she was doing.

Right next to the front door was a daddy long legs. Not even a real spider, technically. A leggy, harmless, slightly absurd-looking thing perched on the door frame.

She screamed.

I do not mean she flinched. I mean she screamed like she was being murdered.

And then she spent the next nineteen minutes of our twenty-minute party talking about how she could not believe she had screamed like that, how embarrassed she was, how terrified she had always been of bugs, how she could not get over the fact that she had reacted that way in front of a PNM, and how was she supposed to recover from that, and could you even believe.

Every time I tried to ask her a question, she would loop back to the spider.

I left that party thinking she would never write down a single thing about me. Because she never asked me a single thing about me.

What I didn’t understand at the time

What I did not realize then, but I understand now, is that the entire structure of recruitment week is designed around members gathering information about PNMs. After every party, members go upstairs or to the chapter library and they write down notes on every girl they spoke with. That sophomore at Gamma Phi was supposed to do exactly that. And whatever she wrote down about me was going to be approximately: “screamed at a spider, did not ask her anything, do not remember her name.”

That is not a notes card that gets a PNM moved up the bid list.

Here is the thing nobody tells you about recruitment week. The sophomores doing the recruiting are nervous too. Most of them have been training for this since the previous spring. They have been in mock parties. They have been quizzed on conversation flows. They have a top bid list memorized. And then they walk to the front door of a chapter house in the August heat and a daddy long legs appears, and one of them screams in front of a PNM and cannot pull herself back together.

If I had understood that at the time, I would have known what to do. But I did not understand it. So I sat through the party feeling vaguely like the whole thing was the sophomore’s fault and waiting for it to end. Both of us walked out of that conversation having gotten almost nothing useful out of it.

What I would do now

Years later, after going through recruitment, then becoming a Rho Chi at KU, then coaching other women through this process, I can tell you exactly what I would have done if I had walked into that party with the perspective I have now.

The minute I realized she was spiraling, I would have stepped in gently.

“Oh my gosh, that thing made me jump too. Do you live in this house? What is the dorm-to-chapter-house transition like?”

“I noticed your composite over there. How long have you been at KU? What is your major?”

“Tell me about your favorite event your chapter does.”

I would have asked her about herself, because the fastest way to get a nervous person back on track is to take the conversational pressure off them. And then, before the bell rang, I would have made sure she had three things to write down about me. Where I was from. What I was hoping to study. One specific thing she could remember me by.

Not because I was performing. Not because I was being calculating. Because I would have understood that her job in that conversation was to walk away with information she could write down, and if I left her with no information, that was just as much my problem as hers.

What this means for you

If you take one thing from this story, take this. The conversations in recruitment are not interrogations. They are conversations. And conversations are co-created. If the woman across from you is freezing up, getting flustered, or losing her thread, you are not stuck. You can lead.

You can lead with empathy. You can lead with curiosity. You can lead with specific, easy-to-answer questions that get her talking. And in doing all of that, you are also giving her the time and the structure she needs to remember why you are sitting in front of her in the first place.

The girls I coach who walk through the week most steadily are not the ones with the most polished answers. They are the ones who walk into each conversation curious about the woman they are about to meet. They ask. They listen. They share specific pieces of their own story in return. And they leave each party having made a real impression, not because they were trying to impress, but because they treated the woman across the table like a person.

You will probably have your own daddy long legs moment somewhere in recruitment week. Most PNMs do. Knowing what to do when it happens is half the work.

That is what we do at Cultivate Your Bid. We walk through these moments with girls long before they walk into a chapter house. We talk through the awkward, the unexpected, the suddenly-flustered. We give them the perspective I didn’t have when I was eighteen and a sophomore at Gamma Phi screamed at a bug.

If that’s the kind of preparation you want in your daughter’s corner, I would love to talk.