Today: Feb 17, 2025

Dating website launches at Southern

photo courtesy thecampussocialite.com
At Date My School, students and alumni can meet online

MELISSA CHICKERNews Writer
College students can now meet someone their own age online through Date My School, a safe dating website that recently arrived at Southern.
The website was created to facilitate the meeting of students within the same school through different departments and between different universities.
“It’s the only online platform that simplifies the process of discovering new people, gives you control over who may contact you and ensures your invisibility on search engines like Google – it’s also user friendly and free,” said Balazs Alexa, DMS co-founder along with Jean Meyer.
The website began in November 2010 and since then has boosted over 31,000 members in 350 schools around the country. Southern is not the only Connecticut state school that has joined; University of Connecticut, Wesleyan, Yale, Western and Central Connecticut State Universities are also a part of the dating site.
“Date My School is the safest dating site in the country right now. We are considering ourselves a reverse social network,” said Melanie Wallner, director of public rela¬tions for DMS. “It has all the people you don’t know but can trust because you’re going to the same school and paying the same tuition. They all have something in common.”
The start of the website came about when the two founders heard a friend complaining about how there are no guys for her to meet in her department, made up of 90 percent women. Alexa and Meyer, who received their MBA from Columbia University, began their research to see what is really out there and realized there were no good sites for college students to meet each other, so the two men started their own.
Schools are chosen for the site by the size of the school and what other colleges and universities surround the campus. Users are given the opportunity to filter out the type of people they want to communicate with, whether it be through certain schools, departments, if they are undergraduates, graduates or alumni, or by schools in the same geographic area. Members also can limit their profile access to others to remain private and anonymous if needed.
It gives those who use the website the freedom to meet the people they want to meet, unlike other dating websites that choose who would be the best match for them.
“There isn’t a platform out there successfully, safely and easily connecting college and university students and alumni together. There are so many ways to meet people, this is just another option,” said Wallner.
As well as being completely safe, Wallner also ensures that, unlike most dating websites, it is completely free to communicate with other people in any way throughout the website.
“We value our safety, efficiency, and want it to be user friendly and free,” said Wallner. “Doing all of this was the best solution for the site.”
According to Wallner, one of the main perks of DMS is it’s completely anonymous. Students can not search for specific people, but are able to “like” or add the ones they find they connect with best.
“This is a whole new platform for meeting people and is nothing like facebook,” Wallner said. “The point of facebook is to keep you online with friends while we are trying to get you offline to meet new people face to face.”
According to Wallner, many users land dates within 30 minutes by ways of communication on the website, ranging from instant messaging and emailing if they find someone’s profile interesting. But DMS is not just to find relationship but also to build friendships with fellow students.
“We’re currently extending usage so that DMS reflects what it’s really about: discovering new people,” said Alexa. “It’s an excellent resource for freshmen and transfers who don’t know anyone on campus yet, for upperclass¬men and graduate students who want to discover new friends, and for alumni who want to find new people in the areas in which they’ll be working.”
So far the site has proven to be effective to students, said Wallner, who witnessed two Columbia students meet on the site and within a short period of time were married.
“It’s not just about romantic relationships,” she said. “We get stories all the time about friendships coming out of it as well and that’s really the point.”
DMS is not yet a year old and come this fall will be launching at more colleges and universities nationwide. Eventually the founders of the site would like to expand the site internationally.

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