Freshers Week saw the hallowed cobbles of Trinity awash with vomit before lunchtime

The closest thing many Irish teenagers will get to a sorority or fraternity is the geography or debating society they’re lured into joining during Fresher’s Week, usually with bait as low rent as a lollipop. As soon as the emails about weekly meetings start up, the membership is forgotten. Who among us did not join the trampolining club, thinking our high jinks lives at third level were finally taking off, yet never bounced once? Dig deep enough into that memories box at the back of your wardrobe and you’re sure to find evidence that you were once a member of an ultimate frisbee club, selling your soul for a voucher for a free can of Bavaria. Maybe if the ultimate frisbee club had offered you accommodation in a purpose built house on campus, bewitched you with a weeklong recruitment process and promised that you would be brothers and sisters for life you might have stuck around? What might have been for the Frisbee Fraternity. Sigma Kappa Fling.

Sororities and fraternities are big business in the United States. They form the basis of “Greek Life” in many universities, a tradition which sees students joining these exclusive campus communities – often for their entire four year stint – living together, engaging in philanthropy, partying and making important lifelong connections. They began as secret student organisations in the late 1700s and named themselves using Greek letters. Now, they boast nine million members across the US and Canada. Once criticised for crazy “hazing” rituals, a lack of diversity and elitist recruitment practices, many sororities and fraternities have moved towards inclusion and less homogenous membership. Except, it seems, in Alabama.

“Bama Rush” is the TikTok phenomenon that’s lit up the social media platform for the past few years. This week in universities across the US, it’s “Rush Week”, which is similar to an Irish Fresher’s Week in that first year students are making choices about which club they want to join, or “rush”. That’s where the similarities end, though. Toto, I have a feeling we’re not at a yard of beer competition at a regional Institute of Technology student centre any more.

At the University of Alabama, they take Rush Week to another level. Think Legally Blonde times a thousand. Bama Rush focuses on recruitment to the campus’s largely white and wealthy sororities and the rituals around the complicated and baffling process has TikTok users in an iron grip. Endless videos, themed costume days, must-have status symbols and outfit after outfit from a place amusingly titled “The Pants Store” are so mesmerising they even have me worrying if I have what it takes to get into Alpha Deta Phi.

I’d never wear my big straw hat on the streets of Dublin. Someone would call me JR Ewing

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The eight people you meet in the posh emergency department, including the minor sports-adjacent celebrity

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The difference between Irish students and the Rush Week crowd, however, is slagging. The videos produced by the Bama Rush sororities are so intense and earnest, so choreographed and full of teeth that if anyone tried to replicate anything even remotely similar here, they’d be remembered for the rest of their lives as “those clowns with the videos”.

[ Alphabet soup: third-level terms explained ]

My own Freshers Week memories hone in on the aforementioned yard of ale competition, which inexplicably kicked off at 10am and saw the hallowed cobbles of Trinity awash with vomit before lunchtime. There was also a raw egg eating contest which yielded similar results. I remember clutching my trampoline and frisbee membership cards and wondering if I should board the next bus back to Kildare. The Bama Rush girlies would be terrified they might get some regurgitated Buckfast on their six hundred dollar Golden Goose runners.

Third-level institutions in Ireland are not without their own class issues, of course. The two years I spent at Trinity were an eye-opening lesson in wealth and privilege. The only sorority-level decision to make at Trinners, however, was whether you were joining the Hist or the Phil. Rubes like me joined both, having never heard of either the Historical nor Philosophical Society until I crossed into Front Square for the first time and they were both giving away Funsize Snickers and free pens. I never darkened either of their doors again.

One thing the Bama Rush students and their Irish counterparts do have in common is accommodation costs. The sororities charge hefty fees to live in their chapter houses – some charge thousands per semester. The price of finding anywhere to rent within a 15km radius of an Irish university would probably get you the penthouse at Zeta Tau Alpha. The downside is that at your funeral, they’d still be calling you “that clown that was in the video”.