racist chant video taken of Oklahoma fraternity\u00a0Sigma Alpha Epsilon<\/a>.<\/p>\nAfter being in Tau Kappa Epsilon for nearly two years, I have to say I enjoyed my experience. It was time well spent. I sold\u00a0tickets for our parties, joined other guys with some other projects (pie contest, raffles, dodge-ball contest), and helped it grow from around\u00a020 of us the first\u00a0year, to over 50\u00a0members now.<\/p>\n
I didn’t necessarily join to make friends, but I did appreciate the ones I made. In addition to good relationships, I wanted to do something that would look good on my resume, and I knew it would help with\u00a0networking with other members.<\/p>\n
At first I was just a background guy. I pitched in here and there, but I never had a defined role, nor did I want one. However, later on I was nominated\u00a0to be the Philanthropy Chair of our fraternity. A mid level position with a sizable amount of responsibility.<\/p>\n
I was worried at first, and not that enthusiastic. Still, I remained optimistic about the new opportunity. In the year that I was appointed the position, I brought my brothers to a polar bear plunge (which\u00a0involves driving\u00a0to the beach in February and jump into the freezing cold water. For charity!), a beach clean up, and set up monthly soup kitchen visits with a\u00a0neighboring church.<\/p>\n
One of the coolest moments I’ve had was when I visited the apartment of a friend’s brother over the summer. His brother\u00a0was a teacher in one of the towns near Middletown, my hometown.<\/p>\n
While I was talking to my friend about my time at school,\u00a0I noticed his brother wearing a well-worn shirt said “TKE 1999”. He turned out to be a “teke”\u00a0as well!\u00a0In a blink of an eye,\u00a0we stopped being acquaintances and started becoming\u00a0brothers.<\/p>\n
For me, Tau Kappa Epsilon wasn’t just a “frat”, it was a network of devoted men\u00a0who help and look out for each other.\u00a0Most\u00a0people think what they see about fraternities and\u00a0in movies\u00a0is the real thing, but they don’t see the entire story. My chapter\u00a0had to do a good amount of hard work to get where we are now, and as a founding father, I’m looking forward to seeing it grow even more.<\/p>\n
I am a proud individual, but now and forever, I will always be proud to be a teke.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the first part\u00a0of a blog feature that details my fraternity experience. Not sure\u00a0how many parts there will be, but my best guess is two or three. I was spurred to write about my experience because of\u00a0the recent news regarding fraternities within the past 12 months,\u00a0most of it negative.\u00a0I’m specifically speaking of the racist […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":76,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2483","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alumni","category-himmler"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogsdev.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogsdev.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogsdev.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogsdev.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/76"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogsdev.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogsdev.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2483\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogsdev.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogsdev.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogsdev.farmingdale.edu\/sites\/rambassadors\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}