Dear Chapter Advisor,
I hear it’s Volunteer Appreciation Week, or so Nationals keeps telling me on Twitter, so I figured that I should I write you a thank you note for being our chapter advisor. To be honest, I didn’t even know you were “just” a volunteer until the other day, when you casually mentioned you don’t get paid for this. What are you, insane? You’re here ALL. THE. TIME. You go to 9pm chapter meetings on a Monday night and standards meetings that last five hours and you don’t even get to go to the formals or frat parties. No one is paying you for that? Sucker.
Opps, sorry, lost my train of thought there. Back to being appreciative. Which I am, seriously. Partly because the lady who was our advisor before you was batshit nuts. She was old – like 40 – and she totally didn’t get us at all. She didn’t even practice proper eyebrow grooming. Really? How can she possibly understand what we are dealing with? I mean, when she went to school, people probably still used email and watched live TV, so obviously she has no idea what our problems are like. Never mind that she actually expected us to read the bylaws. Like the rules are real or something.
But you’re not that bad. In fact, you’re pretty cool. You don’t really yell at us when we fuck up, you just ask us what we can do better next time. Sometimes you don’t even tell on us to whomever it is you report. Actually, now that I mentioned it, who do you report to? I don’t get how this whole thing works. Is there like a whole army of people who just give their time away to the sorority? Why? Don’t feed me that line about giving back to the organization that gave so much to you – you guys must get secret vacations or something, right?
Anyway, back to you and things I’m appreciative of. It’s nice that you don’t sound THAT pissed when the chapter president calls you at 2am on a Wednesday with a problem that definitely could have waited until morning. You even tried to make that day-long chapter retreat slightly less painful by buying candy and pizza for everyone out of your own pocket, since we drained the budget spending way more on formal than we were supposed to. You don’t get mad at that girl who drags out chapter meeting by babbling on about Greek Week t-shirts even though all you want to do is go home and chug a bottle of wine. Sometimes, you go to bat for us with Nationals or the Greek Advisor when you think that they are treating us unfairly. Or you tell us that we are acting like entitled assholes when we complain about being in trouble when we legit deserve to be. I respect that kind of honesty.
Plus, you definitely put up with a lot of our personal bullshit. You take the time to write scholarship and grad school recommendations for whoever asks you, even though you could totally say you’re too busy. You answer the phone when someone’s mom or dad calls you while you’re at your real job (you know, the one that pays you) with a question. You text that girl that hasn’t shown up to anything in a month not to bitch at her about attendance, but to make sure she’s okay. You even sat and listened to me that time that I was upset that guy I liked asked someone else to his formal, even though that’s definitely not part of your job. You genuinely seem to care about us as people, which is pretty cool.
So even though my sisters and I very rarely remember to say thank you, we do appreciate you. So thanks. Really. Maybe I’ll even be an advisor myself someday…but only if there really are secret vacations. Otherwise, that just seems like a lot of work.
Loyally,
A Chapter Member
Nice Move389
Respond
Jenna Crowley
Jenna used to be known as 2NOTBrokeGirls, but then one of the girls actually went broke, so she's struck out on her own. Jenna spends her free time saving the world, one sorority girl at a time (usually while wearing yoga pants), questioning why she decided to get a doctorate, and documenting her love of all things cheese related. You can ask her anything you want about football, using your boobs to get what you want, and pizza at @JennaLCrowley on Twitter or via email at JennaLCrowley@gmail.com.
@JennaLCrowley
