"You basically flirt with people you've never seen [by] sending out leading messages," said Jun. Once a month or so, "a `face-to-face' [meeting] lets `confers' meet the person on the other side of the terminal," said Jun.
"The ratio of guys to girls [in the `confer'] is 8:1," said Jun. "So whenever a girl gets on, she gets a lot of mail."
"Confer-ing" is not just for computer science jocks. Less than 60 percent of confers are computer science or engineering majors. "Teleconferencing and electronic mail are the only things you can do on computers without knowing anything about them," Jun explained.
One question is especially popular now: "When you're `confer-ing,' do you prefer the act or do you prefer cuddling?"
"I think they prefer cuddling," said Jun. "Doing the act requires too much concentration."
The Ann Arbor school instituted this program, which "confers" see as "the wave of the future," in the fall to become the only public university to allow students access to the school's mainframe computer.