Saturday, September 29, 2012,  the New Member Upsilon Class got together the day of the installment as official pledges for their first bonding day. The purpose of this retreat was first and foremost to outline the upcoming events/semester for the new members. They learned about all of the upcoming events, the amount of service hours they are required to complete during their new member semester (5), the history of the fraternity, the requirements for initiation, big/little relationship information, the hazing policy of the university, and everything the fraternity is involved in throughout the year that we would love for them to participate in if they have the time and choose to do so. Additionally, they spent time reviewing their debate papers (each new member writes a debate paper on a topic of their choosing) with our scholarship committee. They also played several games to get to know each other better. For instance, they played the name/word game where they had to say their name and a word that starts with the same letter as their name that describes them. They then had to say everyone else who came before them and those peoples’ fun facts. Another game played was called "guess whose story.” Each new member wrote down a story that they wanted to share with their new member class. Then, E-board and new member committee, who also were expected to attend this event and write their stories, read the stories out loud and everyone had to guess whose story was whose. It was a fun way to get to know one another. Finally, the new members got together into groups and discussed service events they would be interested in hosting as part of the fraternity. To increase their skills in working as a team, we gave them several options and they chose to play "the human knot” game in groups of two. Essentially, in each group, they held hands in a tangled way and two people tried to direct each group respectively to get untangled. This game was very good for teaching them to trust one another and work together. The E-board and new member committee also participated.