Greek Week celebrates with Rock ‘N Roll
Every year, Minnesota States fraternity and sorority members host a week full of campus activities to celebrate the chapter’s year. This year’s Rock ‘N Roll theme goes from Monday to Friday with a new event daily.
The week showcases the two sides to Greek life- philanthropy and social activities.
For many in Greek life, Greek Week represents a “mini-homecoming,” a time when fraternities and sororities come together to celebrate their community and engage in friendly competition. The members don’t normally all get to spend time together. It is a chance for them to break out from their usual chapters and meet and bond with others. It is also a time to gain new recruits and show off the fun of Greek life.
The consensus between the members of FSL is that students who are considering giving Greek life a shot, should, “just go for it.”
“There is no harm in trying out Greek life,” Greek Week co-chair and Alpha Chi Omega member Avry Henning said. “You never know who you can meet and what connections you can make through this time in your life. It’s just so rewarding in so many different ways.”
The week starts off Monday with a free cookout with hotdogs, chips and drink to anyone who joins. Tuesday will feature a canned food drive where all proceeds will go to the Maverick Food Pantry.
“The most anticipated event every year is by far the boat regatta,” former Sigma Nu President Joe Roeser said.
The boat regatta takes place in Highland Center’s 25-meter lap pool. All chapters create their own boat made of cardboard and duct tape. Two members from each chapter must row their boat to the finish line. The event tests the ingenuity of each chapter and the willingness to work together. Anyone can attend the event from 7-8 p.m. Wednesday to see if the boats will sink or swim.
The event’s reigning champion is Phi Kappa Psi.
“I can’t give away how we won,” Phi Kappa Psi member Jaegar Cossette said. “All I can say is a lot of duct tape was used.”
The biggest event of the week —the lip sync battle — takes place 6-10 p.m. Thursday in Ostrander Auditorium. The Rock ‘N Roll theme should be a factor during the lip sync battle as each chapter tries their best to recreate their favorite bands and songs.
Following the lip sync battle, the Greek life members will host an after party at Applebee’s where a percentage of sales will go toward Mavathon, the largest student-run philanthropy event on campus.
The last event of the week is Friday’s Minute to Win It games.
All chapters created banners that hang in the CSU. They are supposed to represent this year’s theme and each banner will be judged.
Throughout the week each chapter will gain points based on their performance at each event. Whichever chapter scores the best throughout the week will earn a winning plaque commemorating their efforts for this year’s Greek Week.
Greek life is more than just what meets the eye. It brings many opportunities and connections. It is a good resume builder, a way to meet alumni, a chance to build life-long friendships and a place where you can grow within the community as Greek life requires volunteer work.
“It’s a perfect balance between professional and social life,” Roeser said. “It is like dealing with a little corporation. Each fraternity and sorority has hundreds of connections, whether it’s alumni or friends. Greek life can help us significantly with anything we need, now or in the future.”
Header photo: Greek life members hosted a cookout for the first day of Greek Week Monday. Free hotdogs, chips and drinks were given out on campus to celebrate the week ahead. (Davis Jensen/The Reporter)
Write to Luke Jackson at Luke.jackson.2@mnsu.edu
Wow! A week celebrating Greek culture. Back in the late eighties I lived in Athens, Greece at Hellenicon Airbase working for Naval Security Group Activity as an Arabic linguist, and when I wasn’t going out to ships off the coast of Syria, Lebanon and Libya or down to the Red Sea, I would be off on my weekends out to the mountains of the Peloponnese looking for ancient temples in the magical sweet smelling cypress forests where Pan, Adonis and Atalanta and her golden apples and the satyrs dwelled or up north to visit ancient towns like Orchomenos mentioned in passing in the Iliad and Odessey. I even got to see the bathtub Odysseus used at Nestor’s Palace while his son, Telemachus, was looking for him in the Odessey.
I would go out to the Acropolis three times a week to photograph the Parthenon at sunset, with its distant reflection in a mud puddle. But strangely the most beautiful Greek temples in the ancient world are in Italy in places like Paestum south of Naples, three gorgeous fifth century BC temples that are incomparably complete compared to the temples of Greece. And Sicily, too, is smothered in complete Greek temples, like the gorgeous sandstone temples of Agrigento flaming in the sunset and there are Greek cities like Siracusa with temples whose columns now how hold up ancient churches and there are Greek theaters smothered in mustard blossoms or are up on cliffs overlooking the Straits of Messina underneath the distant peak of Mount Etna .
But, the largest Greek temples ever built are in present day Turkey, which is Ionian Greece of the later Hellenistic times when the Greeks mistakenly thought bigger was better, like the temple of Artemus at Ephesus, and at Dydma down the coast a ways, and also there was a huge temple on the island of Samos.
I had a one month vacation every year in the Navy that would afford me the opportunity to see these wonderful places and much more, such as the gorgeous Byzantine churches around Greece and Turkey, like Mystras in the Taygetos Mountains just south of Sparta or the churches of Cappadocia, carved out of a Badlands type area of central Turkey, which, back during Christian times was very Greek speaking.
I have since revisited all these places with a digital camera which afforded me the opportunity to photograph all of Greece’s archaeological museums. I travelled all over Greece one summer off my Saudi job looking for a vase depicting Achilles playing chess with his friend Patroclus out on the Troy Battlefield (another place I visited up on the Dardanelles of Turkey and photographed in the spring when Homer’s poppies were blooming). At any rate, I never found it in Greece. I was later in the Vatican Museum and looked up and saw a man staring intently at this vase in this room full of Greek vases, and I knew what it was and moved around to the other side and there it was.
MSU English/Spanish alumnus writing from Karnataka State in southern India.