What Is a Suicide Bid in Sorority Recruitment?

If you’ve been scrolling RushTok or talking with sorority members, you’ve probably heard the term “suicide bid.” It sounds dramatic—and honestly, it’s not a phrase most people in recruitment love. The official name is Single Intentional Preference (SIP) (sometimes called "Intentional Single Preference" or "ISP"). But since “suicide bid” is what you’ll hear most often, let’s break down what it actually means.

How Bids Normally Work

During Preference Round (the final round of sorority recruitment), most Potential New Members (PNMs) attend two houses. At the end of the night, you sign your Membership Recruitment Acceptance Binding Agreement (MRABA), ranking the houses you visited.

If you rank both houses, you are guaranteed a bid to one of them.
If you are only invited to one house, you are still guaranteed a bid to that chapter. You are not penalized for circumstances outside your control.

What an Intentional Single Preference Means

An Intentional Single Preference (aka “suicide bid") happens when a PNM who has two houses after Pref Round chooses to drop one and only list one.

This is the moment where the guarantee disappears. If you had two houses but only rank one, you no longer have a guaranteed bid.

Best case scenario: you rank high enough on that chapter’s bid list and receive a bid from them. 🎉
Risk: if you don’t rank high enough, you won’t receive a bid—even though you had another option.

That’s why we prefer the term ISP. It describes the choice you’re making without the scary label.

Why Would Someone Suicide Bid?

The main reason a PNM chooses an ISP is because she really doesn’t want a bid from her other option. It feels like a way to control the outcome and go all in on her favorite chapter.

But almost everyone strongly advises against this. Here’s why:

You'll probably love the other house. It happens all the time—PNMs are lukewarm on Pref Night, accept a bid, find their people and forget this house wasn't their first choice!
You give up your safety net. Ranking both houses guarantees you’ll receive a bid. Dropping one means you could end up without a bid on Bid Day.

That’s the tradeoff: you’re betting against your second option, and in doing so, you’re also betting against your guaranteed spot.

What Happens If You Don’t Match Your One House?

If you only list one chapter and don’t match to them, here’s what could happen next:

Snap Bid: Right before Bid Day, a chapter that didn’t fill quota can extend an immediate offer. This happens quickly—before bid cards are handed out.
Continuous Open Bidding (COB): If you don’t match and don’t receive a snap bid, you can still join COB after Bid Day. COB is a more relaxed, open process where chapters with spaces left invite PNMs to events and offer bids individually.

So while your sorority journey doesn’t necessarily end, the process becomes less predictable than if you had ranked both houses.

The Bottom Line

A suicide bid is an Intentional Single Preference. It’s when you list only one sorority after Pref Round even though you had two. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t—but it always means giving up your guaranteed bid safety net.