Going away for a weekend: how fraternities do it

Sometimes in college, you just need to get away. Fraternities at the University of Maryland must agree because they have come up with an event called “away weekends” to do just that.

“Away weekend is a change to get away from school and schoolwork one last time before finals week,” Phi Sigma Kappa Fraternity’s away weekend coordinator Doug Astler said. “It’s a way to remove yourself from the stresses of College Park.”

Away weekends work like this: a fraternity picks a location and books hotel rooms or cabins depending on the season, fraternity members invite women to be their dates to the event, and they head off to the location for a two night weekend stay. Location, funding, transportation, food, damage control and risk management are some of the aspects that go into planning one, according to Astler.

“The guys in the fraternity basically plan everything and we [their dates] just show up,” sophomore at the University of Maryland Maggie Koester said. This semester will be her second time going on an away weekend.

Any woman can be asked to go, she doesn’t have to be in a sorority or even go to this school. This ends up making a pretty diverse group of people.

Phi Sigma Kappa is reativelely new to planning away weekends, this semester being their second ever. They just recently reestablished their fraternity in 2011 and decided to pick the tradition back up, according to Lorin Pierson, senior at the University of Maryland and member of Phi Sigma Kappa.

“We felt it was a tradition that Greek life usually partakes in and we wanted to start our own traditions,” Astler said. “It was one more step to becoming a ‘real’ fraternity on campus.”

Also establishing itself alongside the tradition of away weekends is the tradition of the women attending these away weekends to make decorated coolers for the men who invited them to come.

“It’s really big in the South,” junior at the University of Maryland Lana Marcon said. “Southern sororities do them all the time and I guess it just spread to here the past couple years.”

There’s even a page on Facebook called “Cooler Connection” where women post photos of the cooler they decorated, according to Koester. This page helps women with ideas on what to paint on these coolers. These coolers are not a silly crafting project; they take a lot of time and are hand-painted, according to Koester.

“I think a lot of people want to go on away weekends because it’s like a mini vacation with a bunch of your friends,” Astler said.