By Ej Dickson. Yet amid the coronavirus panic of the past few weeks, when colleges, universities, and workplaces started shutting down en masse and social distancing evolved from buzzword to public-health necessity, there were no options available for singles who wanted to find love in the age of mandatory self-quarantine, until three college students decided to make one.
The website, which connects college students from more than schools across the country for virtual Zoom dates, is called OKZoomer β a reference to both the video-conferencing app it uses as a platform where many universities are holding virtual classes , and the generation to which it caters. The school officially canceled in-person classes for the rest of the semester. When Gorska sent her a meme referencing love over Zoom, Valdez finally saw her opportunity.
Valdez and Gorska decided to post a Google form promising to match up college students interested in either a blind date or making a friend. It went viral on various meme pages, generating more than 1, responses. Valdez enlisted her brother Jorge, 23, a Southern Methodist University graduate with a computer-science degree, to come up with a simple algorithm to match people based on the data from the form , then send them their contact info so they can independently set up Skype or Zoom dates.
What happens on those dates or how long they are is entirely up to you though as the recent Netflix hit Love is Blind hints, when people are cut off from the outside world, they tend to have intimate, inebriated, extremely lengthy conversations with strangers. Though the initial round of matchmaking was limited to such straightforward criteria as age and gender, the Valdezes and Gorska quickly discovered there was a real demand for a service connecting lonely college students with each other during a socially isolating time.
Currently, OKZoomer has garnered more than 6, sign-ups from students from unique schools. Its growth is based almost entirely on word-of-mouth and posts on college meme pages. The Valdezes and Gorska are currently working on matching up the thousands of students who have signed up for dates, as well as refining the algorithm and making matches more specific by asking more pointed questions. But during a time when people are panic-buying toilet paper and becoming Gchat addicts to avoid losing touch with humanity, OKZoomer is providing college students with a chance to do so, maybe even on a deeper level than they would have with students on campus.
