This January, Sanjay Banda ’18, Colin ’18, Alexander Wood-Thomas ’18, and Jake Howell ’18 attended the Sigma Pi Mid-Year Leadership Conference. More than 600 brothers of Sigma Pi Fraternity congregated at the Hilton Hotel in St. Louis, Missouri. The purposes of the conference were to learn leadership skills, meet brothers from around the country, and share ideas.
The major focus of this year’s conference was recruitment. David Stollman, a well-known motivational speaker in the Greek community, gave speeches to the entire group on both days of the conference and led small group sessions with the recruitment chairmen. He first addressed the stereotypes about fraternity men widely believed across the country and insisted that every brother of Sigma Pi should be actively fighting these stereotypes by refusing to fulfill them. He connected this to recruitment. The fraternity on campus that breaks the bad stereotypes will attract the highest quality potential new members. The major takeaway about recruitment was that quality drives quantity. Many fraternities will take members to boost numbers, but David emphasized that numbers are the result of repeatedly taking pledge classes that completely embody the Sigma Pi ideals. He also provided a detailed system of recruitment that has been proven to improve fraternities across the country.
Beyond recruitment, other meeting topics resonated with our brothers. These included solidifying house values, improving officer transitions, and improving committee and overall house effectiveness. The attendees from Mu Chapter left the conference with new goals in mind to improve the leadership in the house. They plan on implementing what they learned over the years to come.