My Fraternity Pledge Interview Book

October 14, 2026 by Shawn Collins

When I started pledging Pi Kappa Alpha at the University of Maryland in fall 1988, one of the things we had to buy was a small binder and paper to interview brothers.

The book was known as a Harvey T. Newell book, or Harvey T. for short. The name was in recognition of the National President of Pi Kappa Alpha Fraternity, Harvey Thornton Newell Jr., who held the office when the University of Maryland chapter was founded in 1952.

The brother interviews during our pledging semester helped us learn names and personal details of brothers in the house.

Each interview included a series of questions, and we had to have the interviewed brother sign the back of the page afterward. Some guys would just sign it right away, but others would make us do a task or say we would have to do something later to get their signature.

A common task was to find a brother’s girlfriend and get her to write a love letter to the brother. I also had to memorize the Budweiser preamble, go to the local Chinese restaurant and get an employee to write some goofy sentence in a Chinese dialect, and to find out various trivia about the house.

One guy said I’d have to tell him the name of any woman he wanted to meet at a party. I did this each time he asked. He never signed my book.

We had weekly pledge class meetings where we were tested on fraternity history, and we also had to show that we had secured five new interviews each week. I forget what happened to pledges that didn’t get their required signatures.

In each interview, we had to ask the following:

1. name
2. nickname
3. home address
4. home phone
5. local address
6. local phone
7. year in school
8. major
9. favorite drink
10. girlfriend’s name, if any
11. hobbies and/or interests

And then there was a question that changed over time…

• What does brotherhood mean to you?
• What was your most memorable moment as a PiKA?
• Where was the strangest place you ever got laid?
• Now that you’re a brother, what advice can you give to me as a pledge so that I don’t get blackballed?

I typed the original questions on my non-electric typewriter, which I used for school assignments for a couple of years, until I discovered the computer lab.

This book was just one more stressor during my pledge semester, but it ended up being a useful tool for getting to know a lot of the brothers at the time, and it’s fun to look through it now and see what guys had to say back then.

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