College provides dating backdrop

Over my four years at JMU, occasionally I’ve seen some variations of the recurring AOL Instant Messenger away message — “This is the only time in our lives where we will have 15,000 co-eds within a one-mile radius. If those odds aren’t great for hooking up, I don’t know what is.”

With graduation a mere 16 days away, there may be little to no hope left for seniors to benefit from these odds. But it isn’t too late for the rest of you.

College — more or less — is like a lab. Before you groan or have nightmares about long bouts in Miller Hall, hear me out. College is an experimental lab for conducting tests, or dates, to discover what we want and don’t want in a potential significant other.

It’s four years — or more, in my case — of trial and error. We meet new people, make new friends, date, hook up and make up. While some of these happenings undisputably will occur, unless you live under a rock in a shady house off campus, there is a catch to this experiment — you must learn from it.

Anyone can spit lines or bat their eyelashes until they are blue in the face, but it is through paying attention to what you like or dislike about certain relationships, people and yourself that the experiment begins to serve a purpose.

The dating mindset for most tends to change upon graduation. After college, people aren’t looking for the trophy date. They tend to shift the paradigm from hookups and walks of shame to finding someone who potentially may serve a more permanent role in their lives.

The truth is, once graduation rolls around and one is in the vast majority of students who chose to leave Harrisonburg, this immensely dense pool of prospective dates may thin out a little, depending upon one’s destination.

While one can scour local bars, restaurants or night clubs looking for love, there are a few other options. If you are a religious person, a church, mosque or temple isn’t a bad place to start. There, you know you’ll meet people with similar values and thoughts on faith. One could take activities in which they were involved with during college out into the real world, such as volunteering in the community.

Joining your local JMU alumni chapter allows you to meet other JMU grads who you may have been overlooked while here. According to Justin Thompson, director of alumni relations, over 17,000 of JMU’s roughly 80,000 alumni live in the Washington, D.C., metro area, and more than half of all alumni live in Virginia. Local alumni association chapters’ Web sites can be accessed from the Alumni Association Web site at www.jmu.edu/alumni. Alumni chapters participate in social events, service projects, scholarship fund raisers and professional networking, according to Thompson.

The bottom line — undergraduates need to make the most of their current opportunities for relationship enlightenment. And, without a co-ed-dense dating pool, graduates have to get creative to keep up the mingling.