Since June, the free dating site Datemyschool.com has been offered to FAU students. I decided to sign up and check it out — but it seems no one else did.
In order to cut down the types of people who can register, the site requires a university ID to sign up.
Knowing that only FAU men would be seeing my profile, I chose a lucrative name: Single_Lady. I figured that would be charming enough to reel in all of the eligible bachelors on campus.
Not quite.
Columbia University business students Balazs Alexa and Jean Meyer started the website in order to match students with similar goals. It started last November, after a female classmate complained about the lack of men in the nursing school.
After 1,300 Columbia students signed up for the site within the first week, Alexa and Meyer decided to go national.
The site prides itself on two things — its ability to let you to search for other students in your college, and its efficiency.
Director of Public Relations Melanie Wallner mentions, “Our site has instant gratification. Most people have dates within the first thirty minutes, which isn’t usually the case with online dating.”
Both points may have been true in my case were if not for one problem — there was only one other FAU student on the site.
For the sake of salvaging my dignity, let’s assume that he is not an active user. With the exception of his college, his profile is completely bare of any information.
DMS allows you to make your profile as private or public as you want. Once FAUbachelors were no longer an option, Single_Lady went public.
The site has more than 8,100 users and, although most of them are located in New York and its surrounding areas, it provided a necessary ego boost.
DMS includes aspects such as status updates and a “like” button, which makes it comparable to the popular social networking site Facebook. To avoid any confusion, bothWallner and Alexa note that their site is not trying to become a Facebook clone.
“DateMySchool is a reversed social network, introducing you to people you don’t know instead of keeping you up to date on the people you already know,” Alexa said in an email.
Meanwhile, a few minutes and one status update later, instant messages began flowing in from men studying at Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. The first guy skipped the introduction and was wondering “where FAU is located.” Smooth move.
DMS allows you to see who has viewed your profile, which can be both helpful and damaging. For instance: A notification that a “22-year old” NYU student had been viewing my profile seemed intriguing — But he’s not a day under 60.
The site is more than just love connections, as DMS members are making job connections and building friendships rather than only developing romantic relationships.
“We took the best from dating websites, social networking sites and professional networking sites in order to make datemyschool the latest and greatest method of bringing people together,” Wallner mentions.
For more information or to sign up, visit www.datemyschool.com
