Beta Theta Pi - MIT

M IT's recruitment was conducted virtually this spring, having been delayed from the normal fall recruitment period. Virtual recruitment was a daunting task, but the Beta Brothers met the challenge head-on. In fact, since this was our first-ever virtual recruitment period, it was incumbent upon us to not only reimagine certain aspects of recruitment, but to also build up whole new plans and events. Our Brothers, particularly Vice President of Recruitment Luke Woodcock '23 and Recruitment Chairman Eeshan Tripathii '23, poured hours into rethinking the typical Beta recruitment and innovating in nearly every dimension of the experiecne. Such innovations included conducting advertisement campaigns to be directed toward MIT freshmen on sites such as Facebook or Instagram, accessing the MIT email directory to filter through and compile a list of MIT male freshmen to send personalized emails, engineering a robot to aim and shoot balls at a dunk tank with inputs from a Twitch stream, and much more. Perhaps the best addition to recruitment was our charity poker event. With the help of our generous alumni donors, we raised over $3,000 to donate to charity for this event. Freshmen attending the event could apply their winnings toward a charity of their choice from a set list, and any Brothers' winnings were applied to a donation toward RAINN, an American non- profit anti-sexual assault organization. Some of the freshmen attendees donated to the Robert Packard Center for ALS Research, others to Friends of Animals, and some also toward the RAINN. I want to take some space here to extend a big thank-you to the alumni who contributed to this event: Chris Briere '19, Ken Bryan '88, Mike Feinstein '82, Pat Fowler '83, John Kerins '80, Roger Lacy '79, Alan "Tex" Laves '82, Steve Levis '95, Mike Lopez '83, Bill Maimone '84, Herman Marshall '78, Mike McGovern '89, Drew Mutch '98, Matt Rechtin '99, Lei "Crash" Tung '86, Ken Shine '85, and Mike Vogel '02. Your support is very much appreciated, and I'm proud of the positive impact we can make on the world around us with your help. Another recruitment event we were really proud of was the Great Beta Robotic Carnival. Max Fan '23 constructed a robot from a pitching machine that aimed its barrel at a target through virtual inputs. Zach Rolfness '22 assisted with writing the software for the robot and integrating the robot's software with Twitch. On the day of the event, Swochchhanda Shrestha '21 and Pedro Pavao '22 implemented the robot and all the carnival plans, putting up a dunk tank, skee ball machine, and basketball hoop for the robot to shoot at. It was one of the most successful events of this recruitment, and a great way to show off the creativity and engineering prowess of our Brothers. Other virtual recruitment events also included interactive puzzle/mystery experiences, painting with Bob Ross videos using MS Paint, house tours, video gaming, and condensed summaries of famous MIT classes like 6.009. While many other chapters decided to have very few events, we decided to fill that void of empty time, holding exactly 40 events. In fact, by holding 40 events, we literally raised the average number of recruitment events IFC-wide by about two events. I would also like to mention that several other Brothers poured a lot of their time during IAP into developing this recruitment, and I would rather their efforts not go unnoticed. I would like to recognize Kyle Markland '22, Ivan Marshall '23, Mohammadou "Mo" Gningue '23, Ashar Farooq '23, Christopher Kiel '22, and Yaseen Alkhafaji '21. By the end of recruitment, we decided to give out eight bids, and in the end we had four bids accepted. Those men were inducted on February 27 and will be initiated in late April. Yours in _kai_, Keith Mokry '22 Chapter President BUILDING THE BROTHERHOOD, VIRTUALLY Beta Upsilon Chapter Hosts First-Ever Virtual Recruitment 4 Here are some of the better paintings from our virtual Bob Ross event. An unlucky Brother gets soaked in the dunk tank, thanks to Beta's new pitching machine robot. A closer look at the pitching machine robot we constructed for recruitment this year. Brothers meet for a pre-recruitment hype meeting over Zoom. Brothers meet in a virtual Chapter House for the IFC kickoff, conducted over Gather.town.

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