When Christie Severin and Paula Novacki took over the leadership of Phi Alpha Delta, they were only given a dusty box with plastic cups, forks and a scrapbook that wasn’t put together.
Among the resources missing were a charter, an advisor and recognition as a university organization.
Severin and Novacki, the pre-law fraternity’s president and vice president respectively, sextupled the dying organization’s membership, building the group from 10 members to 65 members over the course of one semester.
“The sick thing is that even my freshman year when we had 15 members, I was still like, ‘This is the best fraternity ever,’” said Severin, a fourth-year criminal justice and political science student. “I was so like in awe of it, but I just wanted to make it better.”
Phi Alpha Delta is the largest international pre-law fraternity. It was founded at USC in 1990, but the chapter has gone back and forth between active periods and periods of low membership.
Severin has been a member of the fraternity since her freshman year after living in the pre-law living and learning community. Novacki joined at the beginning of her junior year after she saw a flyer for it on top of a trashcan.
“To be honest, when I joined freshman year I knew I wanted to be president because we had such a low attendance rate. I was like, ‘I want this to change,’” Severin said. “I don’t want people to be like me and hear about it on a chance.”
In transforming the fraternity, Severin and Novacki have added more of a social aspect. In addition to meetings twice a month, the organization also offers networking opportunities, law school visits, workshops and guest speakers.
“I think stepping into a leadership role with a really good partner, we knew we had the same goals, and we really wanted to make this fraternity more than just a biweekly meeting for half an hour that nobody wanted to go to,” said Novacki, a fourth-year public relations student.
One of the biggest changes Severin and Novacki made to USC’s Phi Alpha Delta was adding a three-day formal recruitment process. The international fraternity has an open recruitment policy, which means that anyone who wants to join can do so.
“We really took the time to filter through the people and really educate them about the values of Phi Alpha Delta and what the organization stood for,” Novacki said.
Severin and Novacki hoped to increase the fraternity’s visibility on campus significantly during this process, since other professional fraternities such as Delta Sigma Pi and Alpha Kappa Psi are already so well established.
The transformation story of USC’s Phi Alpha Delta has gotten attention worldwide. Other chapters have asked Severin and Novacki to advise them and network with them, and the fraternity’s international headquarters asked USC to write a magazine article on their transformation story, while their recruitment video won third place in a video competition out of more than 100 chapters.
USC’s Phi Alpha Delta started getting attention from international headquarters on almost a daily basis through social media after the fraternity’s membership experienced such a dramatic increase.
By placing more of an emphasis on the social aspect of the fraternity, the entire atmosphere of the fraternity has changed since the beginning of the Fall 2013 semester.
“I think people just love to feel like they’re part of a close-knit community, where before you might not have known the person on [your] right and on your left,” Severin said.
And as the fraternity continues to grow, Severin and Novacki plan to add even more members to the organization and make the current participants even more active.
“You can sign up to be in an organization and have that on your resume, but if you don’t put in the time and the effort, then what’s the point?” Severin said. “You’re not getting anything out of it; the organization’s not getting anything out of you.”