At the University of Chicago, greek life is not as prevalent as it is at say a state school. That being said, greek life is pretty active on campus and if you’re looking to join a frat or a sorority you won’t have to look very far. Especially if you’re a freshman – freshman have plenty of exposure to fraternities and sororities, as they recruit pretty actively from the first-year population. Pretty much all public parties that fraternities host are targeted at mostly younger crowds.

With regards to your second questions, I’m assuming that by “savage” you mean status quo frat? If that’s the case, then the frats you want to look into are Phi Gamma Delta (Fiji), Delta Upsilon (DU), and Psi Upsilon (PsiU) – and possibly also Sigma Phi Epsilon (SigEp) and Alpha Delta Phi (Alpha Delt).

One last thing you might want to take into account is whether or not you plan on playing on a varsity sports team. Often times sports teams will be associated with a certain frat. For example, the (american) football team has close ties with Fiji and the soccer team has close ties with PsiU.