By Gabriela Resto-Montero
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
GREENWICH VILLAGE — NYU and Columbia University students are the first beneficiaries of a selective dating website, datemyschool.com, dedicated to hooking up students.
Launched Nov. 8 by Columbia Business School students Balazs Alexa, 28, and Jean Meyer, 28, the website aims to make online dating more selective for users by limiting the dating pool to users with verified school accounts.
"My department is 90 percent female, I find it very helpful," said Lara Hirner, 28, a student at Columbia's Teacher's College, who has gone on two dates with NYU and Columbia students since joining the site last week.
Signing up for the website allowed students who were stuck with the same group of classmates all day to meet people outside their network, Hirner said.
Hirner, who has also used the dating sites eHarmony, Match, okcupid and chemistry, joined datemyschool after seeing posters around campus.
"People are around my age range and looking, and the ratio of prospective people who I would actually be interested in is so much higher [on this website]," she said.
"It takes away a lot of the sketchy factor, I think," said Jonathan Feinberg, 24, a graduate student at the Columbia School of Journalism, who signed up on the site last week.
"If a girl's a student at the school of international and foreign affairs at Columbia she's obviously smart and she's obviously motivated so you know a bit going in," Feinberg said.
Since it's launch, close to 3,000 students have registered with the site, Alexa said.
"We were actually surprised by the takeoff," he said.
Alexa said the idea for a student dating website came from a friend at the Columbia School of Social Work who said it was difficult to meet men outside her department.
He realized that students who wanted to date were afraid to join dating sites because of fear that classmates would find them out. The solution is what Alexa calls an "anti-Facebook" model where users can check entire networks, like their school departments, that won't have access to their profiles.
"Here you can date in a private matter," he said.
The matchmaker site, which has been joined by nine schools in California since its launch, will next add the Fashion Institute of Technology and Fordham Law School to its New York network.
