If you're upset with your love life of late or feel like you're better at solving chemistry problem sets than developing chemistry with another student, help may be just a few short clicks away.
A slew of dating websites has begun sprouting up around Harvard's campus, each with its own twist, but all with one common goal: to connect students with their potential soulmates.
Date My School
One particular website, Date My School, created by Columia Business School students Balazs Alexa and Jean Meyer, has established itself at Columbia and NYU, and is beginning to make waves in the Boston area. Available at Harvard, BU, Tufts, and MIT, this site claims to be best for students who are looking for anything from a friend or a date to a "booty call" or a "green card."
Harvard students are certainly taking notice of Date My School, signing up for the site at a rate that would leave Mark Zuckerberg impressed. According to Alexa, about 5 percent of the University registered in a single weekend.
The founders of Date My School have focused their efforts on overcoming the negative connotations that are usually associated with online dating.
"I know that people have a bad idea of what online dating is about," Alexa said. "The problem is that no one has really come up with a better way to serve these needs that everyone has, from college students to young professionals. Everyone needs to find a partner. Why wouldn't we use these tools that we have to help us?"
Alexa compared online dating to writing a book with Microsoft Word as opposed to a typrwriter. "The quality of the book would probably be the same," he said. "But it's going to be less of a pain in the ass for the guy writing it with Microsoft Word."
Date My School aims to eliminate three typical issues with online dating websites: safety, inefficiency, and embarrassment. Users are required to have an email address from their respective college to access the site. From there, the site offers a number of ways in which a person's dating pool can be narrowed according to his preferences. If a user is embarrassed to be using the site, he can opt to only be viewable to other users who lie outside of his network. According to Alexa, dates have been arranged using the site in a matter of a few hours.
Date Harvard SQ
Matches are also being formed on Date Harvard SQ, a website created by Harvard Business School alumni Beri Meric and Philipp Triebel after they "realized that all too often, our friends, classmates and alumni were sacrificing romance for their education and careers." Meric and Triebel are hard at work to ensure that students no longer have to make this sacrifice.
IvyDate
The duo created a second website, IvyDate, to allow love-searching students to get in touch with current students and alumni at the eight Ivy League schools, as well as MIT, Stanford, Oxford, Cambridge, and the London School of Economics.
nChooseTwo
A student's friends can help him find love with nChooseTwo. This site lets students suggest that two of their friends go on a date with one another. nChooseTwo is based on the idea that couples often meet one another through mutual friends. Students at Harvard, MIT, and BU can search for romance on the site.
In a world becoming more and more connected through the internet, the development of online dating websites increases the opportunities that students have to interact with one another. Only time will tell whether or not relationships will develop as well.