Online dating gains popularity at Penn

When it comes to finding love online, Penn students are slowly entering the game.

DateMySchool, an online dating website that targets college students, launched at Penn in August after reaching 15,000 users in the New York area. So far, more than 670 students in the Philadelphia area have registered on the site­ — about 270 of them from Penn.

After signing up with a college email address, users filter who can see their profile based on age, college and even department. “If you are a girl, you can choose to only date guys from the UPenn Law School who are between 26 and 28 years old — and that will give you a very small subset of users who can access your profile,” said Balazs Alexa, one of the co-founders of DateMySchool.

Alexa and Jean Meyer started the site while at Columbia Business School after hearing a girl from the university’s School of Nursing complain about how hard it was to meet guys outside of the nursing department. “They would hang out at the Business School library to meet guys, and it’s not the most efficient way to get to know people,” Alexa said.

For one male Penn student who requested anonymity for privacy reasons, the site was intriguing. DateMySchool lets “the admissions office do most of the hard work of screening out people who don’t share certain values — like higher education, coupled with total control over account visibility … It was an innovative approach that made me want to check it out,” he wrote in a message.

Of the 270 users at Penn, 59 percent are male and 50 percent are in the School of Arts and Sciences. “This is something we generally see when launching at a new school — undergrad guys are the earliest adopters, girls are a bit more shy initially,” Alexa said.

Because of the way in which the site allows users to control who can see their profile, users usually have a high response rate. “Users get dates after an hour of registering for the site because the response rate is so high,” Alexa said.

“I’ve talked to quite a few people through the IM feature and have had a lot of really interesting conversations,” the male student said. In addition to finding a date with a girl from Drexel University, he was able to chat with other users globally.

“I had a really great chat with someone in Hong Kong that involved comparative analysis of the relationship between government and corruption and corporate fraud,” he wrote. “[It’s] certainly not your average dating website.”

Yet others on the site haven’t had quite as much luck. “Philly schools are very underrepresented right now, and the few women who are on the site seem to be undergraduates and I’m looking for someone closer to my age,” wrote a male Penn medical student, who also requested anonymity for privacy reasons. He said he has only had email — and not in-person — correspondence with users on the site.

Alexa explained that some people seem reluctant to use the site because they say that it takes the romantic side out of dating. “But, it’s a lead. You still have to go on the date and be funny. It’s just more efficient,” he said.

According to one College student on DateMySchool, there is a stigma against using dating sites. “People think the only people who use [dating sites] are those who can’t get dates in real life. But in reality, a lot of people just don’t have time for things like dating,” he wrote in an email. “Also, in my case, as with most guys, I think it’s sort of a male ego thing. We don’t want our friends thinking that we can’t get girls!”

Alexa foresees the site expanding beyond just dating and into a sort of “reverse social network,” where users can make new connections before getting to know each other. “It is meant to meet people you don’t already know, the opposite of Facebook, which is meant to friend people after you have already met,” wrote Edward Reybitz, the location manager of DateMySchool for the Philadelphia area.

“I would certainly recommend the site to local female friends,” wrote the first male Penn student. “And to male friends in cities far, far away … I wouldn’t want to encourage any competition too close to home, now, would I?”

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