Preview of Alumni Section

Gamma Nu Homecoming 2005

         When I sat down to write this section of Committed to Lives of Excellence I had only a sketch of what I wanted to say. That was three days before I sit down again to write now. A lot has happened in those three days that completely changed what I have to say about Alumni. Those three days are the magical time in every fraternity known as Homecoming. A time when your house is overrun with Alumni striving to relive their glory days, a time of brothers sitting and listening to old men tell boring stories of the glory days multiple times, all in hopes that this 75 year old alumni will leave behind a check to fix one thing or another that is broken in the house. But this is only part of what Homecoming is about. When I was an undergraduate I never truly grasped the full idea of Homecoming, I just knew we had to spend three days cleaning the house, just so it can be trashed in the first hour, and be on guard for alumni near the dumpster (Homecoming 2005 at Gamma Nu chapter: Drunken Alumni sets Dumpster on fire). I never grasped the nostalgia and memories that are involved. Now that I am one of the alumni, despite I have yet to leave the house, I am starting to understand a lot more about homecoming. Yea it might be mostly about listening to old guys stories, about jumping out of windows, beer slides, three foot snow drifts on their beds and walking 5 miles to school up hill both ways in a nor’easter( a really bad storm for anyone not from New England). But it’s so much more then that. It is about gaining a new perspective on your life, as well as your chapter. For most of the year, many undergrads don’t look much past how this chapter will fare past their graduation. It’s through this alumni that the undergrads gain a chance to look ahead, and think about how it will be when they return in 5, 10 even 30 years down the row. It is the challenge of any good chapter, and alumni for that matter, to help the undergraduates hold on to this chance for the rest of the year. It is so important to any brother and chapter that they are only temporary, but the memories of this place last a life time. That it is the ideals that stand the test of time. We all come to a chapter for different reasons, but without the fraternity, we would not have a place to come for those reasons. We are so short sighted when we are active, we know that we need to bring new guys in, but we never really truly grasp why. Yea we need new guys to grow our chapter, but it’s really because we need them to keep the idea of a fraternity going, so we have a place to come back to. A home we can come back to and plague the young ones with our boring stories about the time someone lit the dumpster on fire,that time you and all your brothers slept outside to raise money for homeless kids, or how they have it easy now, when you were in school you had to walk 5 miles up hill both ways in a blinding nor’easter. 

Now that that little trip down memory lane is done, time to discuss how Alumni can help your chapters in more ways then you may know. Alumni are truly a dynamic part of a fraternity. One that may be under utilized in your chapter, or even disregarded as a bunch of drunk old men who give you money once a year. In this section I strive to show you that we alumni are so much more then that, that we have a lot more to give to the chapter other then just our checkbooks, if you only know how to ask.