Love@wpi.edu: Survey shows truth on WPI Dating

My roommate and I were talking one night about a month ago about the dating situation at WPI. Neither of us having a significant other at the moment, and him just having broken up with his off-campus girlfriend of 3 years, we came to conclusion that so many other men at WPI have come to… things are bad. However we couldn't really decide on how bad they were. Being a biotechnology major I tend not to notice the overbearing amount of male students at this school nearly as much as others might. My roommate on the other hand, being an ME major, tends to have the reverse perspective and well to be frank, just doesn't see all that many women. So on a whim we decided to run a survey with TechNews to try and get some idea as to how things really are with the dating scene. Over the last few weeks surveys have been available at the TechNews table in the wedge for any passerby's to fill out, (including a faculty member or two). The results that we got were very surprising.

Out of a total of 153 surveyed students, consisting of 89 men and 64 women, 63% of the men were single, while 48% of the women were single. In both cases of single people, there a greater than 85% chance that they would be willing to date another student at WPI. Assuming that this is a somewhat representative survey this does give some hope that there are a fair number of single people on campus that are willing to date.

So what if you are one of these single people on campus and you're looking to find that special someone, how would you go about it? First and foremost you have to know what people are looking for. The one main thing that almost everyone in the survey was looking for, both men and women, in a partner is a good personality. Next you have to know how to meet people. According to the survey, both men and women prefer to meet people through friends and dislike meeting people at parties.

So you've talked to your friends and finally met someone that you are interested in dating, where do you go? Both single men and women prefer to use a common interest event as a place to go on a date. However non-single men prefer to use diner and a movie as a dating environment while non-single women still prefer a common interest event with diner and a movie as a close second. Therefore using something that you and a potential partner have in common as a first date may be advisable, and if all goes well and the relationship becomes established you may want to move into the diner and a movie realm.

In the process of tallying these surveys there were a few comments of interest that we would like to share. Of particular importance was the fact that there appear to be some very frisky women here at WPI. A number of the women's surveys had written in answers that they preferred their "bed" or "bedroom" for the best location for a date. Although these answers were from both single and non-single women it would seem that this is something to keep in mind, epically considering that there were none of this type of answers from any of the men's surveys.

We would like to give a special thanks to Scott LeBlanc for assisting with the correlation of the surveys as well as to the TechNews Staff for helping us distribute the surveys.

Survey Results