May 2020
Hello everyone! My name is Georgi Solar and I am the new undergraduate President of the Xi Chapter. I hope everyone is doing well and is staying safe. Although this semester has been difficult in many ways due to the global pandemic and most of us are no longer in Charlottesville, there are some great things to look forward to in the future.
This is an especially hard time for all of us as we could not do many of the things that are important to us, especially our Music For Mental Health philanthropy event benefitting On Our Own Charlottesville that we hold every semester at Boylan Heights. In recent semesters, we have broken our philanthropy record consistently so it was disappointing that we could not carry the momentum. We plan to continue this philanthropy in the fall and I will set up a GoFundMe page to hopefully involve some of our amazing alumni who have wanted to contribute in the past and have not had a platform to do so.
I am more than happy to say we completed another successful rush! Our Rush Chairmen, George Payne ’21 and William Neal ’22, worked very hard to organize great rush events that were fun for everyone. The Rush Chairmen work very hard and sacrifice a lot of their time during rush for the benefit of our fraternity. This year, after historically low rush numbers, we pulled a pledge class of 20 great men and students. Some are from as far away as Singapore and Russia, but most are from the great state of Virginia. We hope to get back on track for initiation as soon as we come back to Charlottesville in the fall.
As we look to the fall semester, we are excited to announce that we recently added a new position called the Martin Chair that keeps our honorary brother, Martin Powell, connected with our fraternity through weekly organized lunches. Martin has been very close to the fraternity for about 30 years now so we decided it was important to maintain this relationship.
It has certainly been a crazy semester and one I had not anticipated, but I am forever grateful for the experiences and opportunities as President of the Xi Chapter. It is moments like this that remind me of all the great people I have in my life as a result of our tremendous brotherhood. I look forward to seeing us continue excelling throughout UVA and beyond UVA.
Sincerely,
Georgi Solar ’22