Today a large segment of the Syracuse population may be experiencing the Valentine’s Day hangover. Some who did not celebrate the holiday may be miffed by the outwardly euphoric couples that did. Some may have woken up today, jaded by the fact that their significant others really thought the value pack of strawberry air fresheners was a great gift. And others may not have been so thrilled at proposals of polyamorous relationships with the logic that the more love, the better.

If you fall into one of these unfortunate categories, fear not! Thanks to the wonder of the Web and an incessant need for interconnectivity, there is a host of Internet dating sites tailored specifically for college students. That’s right — you, too, can date online without running the risk of finding your dad’s profile on Match.com.

Instead of relying on bumping into someone at the jungle-juice cooler at some party and hitting it off the good old-fashioned way, you could try your hand at letting algorithms and questionnaire matchups do the job for you. 

How exactly does this matchmaking technology work? Well, a lot of the lower-end, free-to-use dating sites are nothing more than glorified search engines that match keywords provided by users when they fill out their profiles. Enter ‘dabbling with particle accelerators’ in your ‘Interests’ text field, and you could be paired with the nerd of your dreams based solely off of a text match. Then the candidates are narrowed down based on geographic location and likes and dislikes, such as smoking and pet preference. Voila — you’ve got the engineering whiz who lives across the street, the one you’ve known since freshman year.

Some of the more complex sites, the ones that usually charge a hefty fee, institute the art of algorithms. In this situation, you could be quizzed on every personal detail and interest, from ‘favorite color’ right down to ‘if you had to choose between the ability to juggle or the ability to swallow flaming swords, which would you choose?’ Based on this almanac of your life acquired by the site, the algorithm runs the provided data through any number of calculations (depending on the complexity of the algorithm), and the result is a list of individuals deemed compatible for your specific needs. Oh, how far science and technology have come.

Don’t get yourselves all worked up about this algorithm hocus pocus just yet. Most college-student-oriented sites are so simplistic they resort to the first, more archaic method of matchmaking. With that said, most of them aren’t very reliable. In fact, only a handful of the websites actually restrict their users to college students.

University Love Connection (UniversityLoveConnection.com) is one of the few that requires subscribers to actually provide evidence of enrollment. Campus Hook (CampusHook.com), however, has no guarantee that members are actually college students.

If you subscribe to my camp in the ‘never ever, even if Cristiano Ronaldo joined, would I sign up for a college dating site,’ you’re in for a surprise. According to a study conducted by Albuquerque Journal, more than 70 percent of college students have used an online dating service. According to a Boston Globe article, Americans ages 18 to 22 are more likely to seek such dating services than ever before.

In a time when marriage rates are down, divorce rates are up and more and more students have become opposed to college dating, according to a piece for National Public Radio, this generation’s need for connectivity and social media prowess may be to blame for the aforementioned figures. Having been raised intertwined with technology, this need for connection and a consequent expertise in practicing it has been embodied in all things social media. In its simplest form, even Facebook could be considered an online dating site, and in fact it has applications that function as just that.

So if this Valentine’s Day didn’t shape up to be quite what you expected, just go online, you social media mavericks. There are algorithms and people aplenty just waiting for someone to enter ‘dabbling with particle accelerators’ into their ‘Interests’ field.

Jessica Smith is an information management and technology and television, radio and film dual major. Her column appears every Tuesday, and if you happen to find Cristiano Ronaldo on any of these sites, she requests you let her know by e-mailing her at jlsmit22@syr.edu.

Published on February 13, 2011 at 12:00 pm