Many may only see collegiate Greek life as a cultural group who hides their partying behind community service hours and charitable donations. However, I want to challenge that stereotype by focusing on the professional development and self-improvement opportunity that's presented to Greek life members - especially those that hold leadership positions. Currently, I serve my one-hundred member sorority as chapter president and work with other officers to keep a well-balanced, structured, and involved organization.

Fraternities and sororities must operate as a small business first, and a socialite second to be able to be successful. I would like to point out some key concepts that report the relation between Greek organizations and businesses.

Greek organizations:
• Divide officers into teams to focus on specific areas of the chapter
• Must operate on a strict budget, fueled solely from member's dues
• Must market themselves well in order to continue to recruit new members
• Have mission statements and values to hold their members to and gear their brand
• Must follow rules from, and report to, their national headquarters
• Have insurance to cover their organization and its members, along with many policies and procedures in place for holding events

These are just a few points that show how Greek organizations are ran as the best business, combining friendship with professionalism and offering members a great opportunity for personal development.

As president, I see all sides of running a Greek organization and must help every officer no real matter what team her position is a part of. My days are filled up with constantly making decisions and weighing the consequences. I have discovered to create fair decisions that benefit the more good, while remaining unbiased in the process. I also response to everyone's questions and concerns while problem solving when an unplanned event takes place. For example, we had a small crisis with flyers which were made to advertise an event we were having. Once they came in, we noticed the contact email on the flyers was spelled wrong. After some deliberation, we made a decision to utilize the flyers we had and made a brand new email with the typo included.

A huge section of managing a successful organization works well and professional communication. Our main forum of communication between officers and the advisory board is emailing. I discovered just how to properly send and react to emails in a specialist manner. My communication skills have improved substantially since being fully a leader of my chapter. I have learned to communicate concisely and format information in the most effective way. I have found providing information in bullet lists is the best way to obtain members to read messages fully. All of our officers must hold team meetings and get reports of progress in different areas on their team. Officers are in charge of organizing their particular meetings and taking minutes to record the thing that was discussed. Greek organizations teach members to effectively and professionally communicate through emailing, holding meetings, and working with others.

One of the very valuable traits that I'm still learning through my presidency, is ways to get confident with hard conversations. I work closely with your Director of Standards and Ethics to ensure our members are holding themselves to the high ideals and values. If someone is falling behind, it's our job to own conversations using them about why this really is happening and what we are able to do to ensure it doesn't happen again. These tough conversations become even tougher when remembering that the members of our chapter will also be our friends and sisters. As a leader of a Greek organization, I am learning how to have these hard conversations while residing in control of myself and the conversation.

Greek life has so much more to offer compared to social aspect of the organization, and can truly prepare young adults to become listed on the professional world. Through developing members personally, and developing officers professionally, Greek organizations can provide life-changing collegiate experiences that can't be found elsewhere.