I came to Puget Sound without having given the Greek system much thought. I never saw Animal House, and Legally Blonde hadn’t quite come out. I’m not sure what prompted me to rush but I arrived back on campus in January 2001, full of hope and unsure what to expect.
It didn’t quite work out how I planned: At the end of the week, I found out I hadn’t matched with my preferred houses. But I muddled through the rest of the semester and started to find my footing. Despite some lingering disappointment, I tried again during fall rush my sophomore year.
This time, things worked out differently. I joined Pi Phi and quickly slipped into the late-night study sessions, rituals, and parties. I was thrilled to be part of a collective, and even then I felt lucky to be surrounded by those friends. But I had no idea that in the midst of it, I was constructing the scaffolding of my life.
I first felt that support at the end of my junior year, after I finished studying abroad in Vienna and met up with a fellow Pi Phi who’d been in London. We travelled through Italy together, living on baguettes, cheese, and tomatoes that we ate in piazzas and parks. Being with someone who got me was so refreshing; it didn’t matter that we couldn’t afford a proper meal.
In 2021, as soon as my second COVID vaccine dose kicked in, I took a trip to Park City, Utah, to visit a Pi Phi who’d moved there during the pandemic. We took a funicular to the top of the St. Regis, drinking bloody marys and champagne on the terrace. I hadn’t left Oregon in months, and being up there with the spectacular views, I wasn’t just reminded that the world would go on. I felt in my bones that it had more potential than I could even imagine.
In 2022, still in the midst of COVID, two Pi Phis and I who were living in Portland all turned 40 — a strange, hard year to properly celebrate. For each of our birthdays, we picked one nice restaurant and went all out. “A literal lifeline,” one of them, an intensive care unit nurse, remembers.
While my years as a Pi Phi at Puget Sound were meaningful, it’s everything that’s happened since that really sticks out. Twenty years after graduating, these friends are still the people I turn to first. I know that I would have friends even if I hadn’t been part of the Greek system. But I wouldn’t have these friends. I wouldn’t have made these memories. Somehow, at 20, I made connections that didn’t just give me a social life — they became the texture of my entire life.
Aimee Rawlins ’04 is a Seattle-based writer, editor, and content strategist with more than 15 years of journalism experience. She has held senior editorial roles at Fast Company and CNN and is pictured here in Park City, Utah, when she was visiting a fellow Pi Phi in 2021.
