Students Offer The 'Desperately Seeking' A Solution

"Harvard MBA seeks merger with warm, attractive sincere woman with firm assets," pitches one Business School student. An undergraduate challenges readers, "Business School students are narrow-minded, conservative and boring. Law School students are humorless and boring. Medical School students are just boring. Prove this senior woman wrong."

These Harvard students, frustrated by unrequited love or just "looking for a good time." are among many appealing for dates in ClassMates, a personal advertisement flyer circulating at several Boston area colleges.

Two Harvard undergraduates have joined a nationwide trend towards matchmaking through news ink, by introducing a publication, which promises safe dating to college students. ClassMates offers students, too scared to test the regular personal columns, a chance to indulge their impulses in a relatively secure environment.

Filling A Social Gap

ClassMates is the brainchild of Robin Alper '87 and Betsy Kramer '87. The two Quincy House residents are banking on their belief that such a venture will fill an existing gap in the social lives of local students.

"I spoke with lots of people who were dissatisfied with college social life," Alper says. "Boston is a college mecca and there's really no way to meet undergraduate and graduate students from other schools."

Alper says she believes ClassMates, which aims exclusively at college students, is the only publication of its kind. The flyer has a circulation of 10,000, features an average of 70 ads per issue and is printed three times during the school year.

"It's about time Boston had such a great alternative to 'the party scene, bar scene, frat scene, library scene, laundry scene," says a Harvard senior, who began her ad with "I'm not in love, but I could be persuaded."

Both Alper and Kramer have stressed creative, but clean advertisements, which cost 30 cents a word. "It's cheap, you can meet someone for only five dollars, "says Alper.

The following are selections from the four ClassMates issues:

*"Aspiring suburban housewife seeks aspiring young urban professional. I will iron your oxfords if you take me out for sushi."

*"Art damaged Harvard architecture student who drinks heavily for lack of soul mate seeks beautiful, thin, well-textured woman with emotional problems and desire for affectionate sex that leads absolutely nowhere."

*"Generic personal: We are two guys looking for two girls for some generic good times. No brand names, please."

*"I am so bored with books! Anti-intellectual; 20-year-old female seeks same for superficial conversation and lots of fun. I'm overdue to be checked out of the library."

ClassMates targets students who have thought before about running personals in other Phoenix and New York magazine, but were wary of the respondents they would attract.

No Psychopaths Here

"ClassMates is safer than any of the other publications, because ours is a control group [of students] with the same interests and the same backgrounds," Kramer says. "It is not going to attract any Tom, Dick or Harry off the street."

"They are safe, they are students, they are your friends," Kramer says. "How many psychopaths are running around this campus or any other campus?" She adds, "It's for fun people--they haven't been dateless and desperate."

But some Harvard students say the student-only personals are as stigmatized as those run in other publications.

"It's creepy, it's unnatural," says Norman Gholson '88. "I'm not interested in being romantic with someone who isn't a friend of mine." Adds Mike Eilperin '90, "I'd be afraid of the type of people who respond."

Kramer says ClassMates' clientele is "not looking for someone to marry. Rather, they are looking for fun and a way to meet new people." But she adds, 'I don't think anyone is looking for cheap sex." The editors say they have not had to refuse any submissions.

Each personal elicits an average of 13 responses, most of which are detailed and creative, not jokes, according to Alper. Kramer says many responses come from graduate students, including "med students who don't want to hear about cadavers any more."

"Letters were rolling in, "Kate Webster '87 says about her ad. She adds, "whenever I get bored I just pick up the letters and call them." Webster says she is most likely to answer letters which sound down-to-earth.

Testing The Waters

At first afraid of ClassMates' readership, Webster tested its audience by placing two ads, one asking for people interested in having "a good time," the other relatively more innocent. She says she was impressed that the less suggestive ad received more responses.

"The comparative response said to me that it is real. I'm a lot less wary now," says Webster.

"I haven't answered in a long time and I am in a kind of rut now," says Webster. "So I think I might call on of my respondents."

A Harvard upperclassman says that after nine dates with nine different guys she "is the envy of [her] hall." A Quincy House senior says she specified that she was six feet tall and received a response from a law student who is six feet, four inches tall--which was "pretty psych."

Alper and Kramer, who have placed ads in every issue, say their responses have included a puzzle, a mock resume, a photo of Mel Gibson, and a letter from a medical student written on a diagram of a skeleton.

One Quincy House resident says she fills her ads with specific allusions to songs and performers she likes in order to garner compatible respondents. She has included lines from Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson because she says people who pick up on these cues must have something in common with her.

Alper and Kramer have invested more than $1000 in ClassMates, which, based on recent sales revenue, they expect to turn into a slight profit before graduating in June. Most of the cost is attributable to advertisements and printing costs of the four-page flyer.

Currently issues are distributed at Harvard, Boston and Tufts Universities, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Wellesley College. Drops are made at key campus locales and occasionally door-to-door.

The Quincy House seniors have run ClassMates from Alper's Lexington, MA. residence to avoid conflicting with the College's rule against operating businesses out of University dorm rooms.

Alper admits being worried that the project would fail until she saw her P.O. box bulging with responses. "Things were spilling out," she says. "It was the greatest feeling."

The two editors, who initiated the venture in 1985 because "they wanted to run their own business," do not intend to publish ClassMates after they graduate. They are interested in selling the business, but are still searching for a buyer.

Alper and Kramer say they enjoyed this venture, in part because it enhanced their own social lives. "We had a vested interest, and went on a few dates," Alper says.