State of the Chapter
Dear Alumni,
The State of the Chapter is good. We are now in the second semester in the house and things are going well. Recruitment this semester has been successful, we now have a 4 man pledge class which is going very well. Our marshal, Bill, is doing educational sessions twice a week followed by brotherhood activities. As a tradition, we all go to Champs for $1 nachos on Tuesdays and have been doing that every Tuesday. We are expecting another pledge class as soon as this one is finished. It is looking very promising that there will be a bunch of newly initiated brothers living in the house next year.
On the scholarship front, we are doing very well. Fall semester the chapter had the second highest fraternity GPA with a 3.32. This translated to 11th highest all Greek GPA. The brothers are extremely pleased with this achievement as it surpassed our goal of a 3.0. We are also pleased to announce that we had the highest New Member GPA of 3.67.
The helping hand has been a big part of our past semester and should be the same this semester. As noted in a previous update, K.I.C.K.S. went very well this year, we raised $3,864, enough to grant a wish to two children. We are very proud of this accomplishment. Other than K.I.C.K.S. there were many opportunities that the brothers took a part in including Penn State/Ohio State make a difference day, AT&T Center for Service Leadership's fall volunteer retreat to NYC, Fresh Start, Hall haulers and many other activities. All in all, we completed 238 hours of service or philanthropy. This works down to 23.8 hours per brother which was well above our goal of 10 hours a brother. We are still waiting to hear from the AT&T center for how we stand compared to other fraternities and Greeks. In other philanthropy news, THON was this past weekend, Feb. 20-22, 2004.
Nationally, we have recently attended the Mid Year Leadership Challenge in Kennesaw, GA. There were sessions in the north but they were during K.I.C.K.S. weekend. This event was very informative and helped us to see new ways to improve our chapter and gave us the security that there are other chapters in similar situations as us financially and otherwise. This event was attended by Avi, Bill and myself. In the next few weeks we will be filling out applications for the Howard Alter Jr. Chapter excellence award, Chapter excellence awards, and Reginald E. F. Colley award, and the Dale A. Slivinske Memorial Scholarship. All are awards that are extreme honors to receive.
Socially we have been creating more ties around the campus. Since we had no house last year it was very hard to be socially involved. However, this year we have had events with SLC, USL, Phi Mu, and the Blue Band. In addition we have socials planned or in the process of being planned with Alpha Xi Delta, Phi Mu, Kappa Phi, Theta Delta Chi and others.
Now, we are looking towards the future. We are in the planning stages for this years Omega Chapter and National Founders Day celebrations. Hopefully this years will be one that we can get many alumni out for. We have also been spending time doing some small jobs around the house, but we feel that there is still a lot to be done. Almost every day we think of new and better ways to improve the house, and we find things that need to be fixed that a multi-day walk through might not find, but multiple days of living in the house have. These ideas will be presented in due time to allow some discussion among the Alumni board and will eventually be presented at the Founders Day alumni meeting (April 24, 2004).
Finally, I would like to extend Fraternity Honors to Brother Daniel Gregory for receiving the William W. Asbury Award for Student Organization Leadership January 23, 2004.
I hope this gives you a good picture of what we have been up to. We are very excited with our accomplishments this year.
We hope to hear from all of the alumni more often. Your support can help us a lot.
Jacob Wolf
President- Theta Chi Fraternity
Omega Chapter