Own Your Experience

Dear Actives and Pledges,

While I can’t point to a “best” moment in my pledging process, I’d love to share a great message found in my pledge binder when I first joined Alpha Phi Omega, and what I got out of it. It is tradition for every pledge class namesake to issue a challenge, and this was the one I got:

To tell you the truth, when I first read it, they were just some nice-sounding words to me at first. The message didn’t make an impact until a couple years later when I got really invested in APO. By then, I had grown a lot since pledging.

As a pledge, I wasn’t a really popular and talkative guy. I knew absolutely nothing about Fraternities or Davis itself since I had just transferred. I didn’t even know anyone I was pledging with, and to make matters worse, I’m really awkward around new people when I’m outside my comfort zone. I had two goals: do my requirements and don’t rub people the wrong way. I never ran for any pledge officer positions because I felt like all the really social people around me were much more in the loop with how the Fraternity works. To give you an idea of how reserved and average I was in most respects, I’m pretty sure there were superlative awards for “Quietest Pledge” or “Shyest Pledge”. I didn’t get those either. I hadn’t really planned on being all that active afterward, since pledging was only an okay experience and nothing too amazing.

In my first active term, I planned on leading a pledge group and nothing more. That is, until the pledge educators asked me to be the Sneak Chair. For those of you who don’t know, Sneak was a big pledge class-planned fellowship that had an active member as chair to help pledges out. I had no idea why I was picked since I didn’t even fill out an application for the position, but I figured if no one else would do it, sure, why not. So I did the position the best I could and got plenty of help from other actives. It was stressful at times, but it was a great foray into practicing how to plan a project from start to finish. It was one of the highlights of that term, and I felt like I really got to know more about how the chapter works. If nothing else, it felt awesome to have something run successfully under my watch.

Some time toward the end of that term, I went to the National Convention. I have to mention Nationals because that was by far the best single experience I ever had as an active. I went with around a dozen other Iota Phi brothers to Boston, and we stayed in a couple nice rooms at the fancy Hilton. I must have gone to around 16 hours of workshops during those four days, including three of the five APO LEADS courses. I met the APO National President, the National Fall Pledge Class Namesake, APO Philippines National President, legendary Iota Phi alum like Beth Tom and Dave Emery, the Region Director and more. Yes, people: those names on your quizzes and in your pledge manual belong to actual people, and it was pretty surreal meeting them face to face. At the same time, I got to experience some real interchapter bonding with Section 4 and Region X, because at the convention, we just roll deep. Beyond all that though, by far, the most important thing I learned at Nationals ’08 is that no matter what little imperfections you might find in your chapter or people in it, the greatest purpose of the Fraternity is service. Nationals is a professional event, where people act professionally. People go there to create better leaders, to become better leaders, and make the world a better place. I got a glimpse at what Alpha Phi Omega is really about.

After being Sneak Chair and going to tons of workshops at Nationals, I thought hard and decided to run for Membership Vice President. I put in a ton of work: I synthesized all the ideas I got from the convention, analyzed the project-planning experience I got as Sneak Chair, studied that term’s MVPs, and I drafted my budget before the election. I was set. My game face was on and I thought to myself, “This is the only position I want to do in APO. I’m going to make it the best damn term I’ve ever had.” By election day, I was dead nervous, but determined even though my partner and I didn’t think we were nearly as popular as our opponents. We gave it our speech and handled the Q&A, and I’d say we looked like pretty decent candidates. And then our opponents went up. They were smooth like butter. Their slide had every bit of information ours did and more, they were stylish, and charismatic public speakers. After both speeches, I was tense as all hell, but I didn’t lose hope that we could win it. And wouldn’t you know it? The results were in!

We lost. I’m not here to give you one of those cheesy Little Engine That Could stories; this was the reality. Losing is a crummy feeling, it really is. But the thing I took from that first election, though, is that even though it was a loss, a loss not a bad thing. It’s not a reflection of me, and it’s not the end of what I could do for myself and for the chapter. I just made a simple resolution after that: “I’m going to turn losing into the best damn thing that ever happened to me.”

Since then, I’ve had a lot of adventures through APO and have done lots of different things. I have held most of the chair positions the chapter had to offer. I created leadership positions and rebuilt what I proudly and genuinely believe is the best resource we have for learning about Iota Phi. I became an advisor, joined section staff, and joined region staff. I’ve gotten to work with more incredible people than I can even remember. Every term since pledging was just something I tried to make better than the last. The lesson I learned about taking my opportunities was just so unbelievably important for my life.

Even today, things like popularity or winning and losing haven’t made much of a difference for me. I may not end up in the top law school of my choice, and I might not become a Fortune 500 CEO some day. But there’s one thing I am capable of doing partly thanks to APO: I can own my experience.

In LFS,

Ashish Bhatt

Iota Phi ‘08