PrincetonLunch: Befriending Your Blind Date

Hey Princeton! Guess what?? I had a date on Tuesday! Intrigued? Curious? Want to hear all the deets? Well, before you get too excited, I should clarify—I had a PrincetonLunch date on Tuesday. Never heard of the program? According to its website, PrincetonLunch “gives you the opportunity to meet new people over friendly lunches.” In other words, it’s a blind date to make friends. But unlike an actual blind date, you don’t have to dissect every detail of the date afterwards with your friends, you don’t have to feel dejected because he/she wasn’t “the one,” and you don’t have to pay for the meal. Sounds pretty good to me.How it works is that you enter your name and netID into the form on the website’s homepage, and then you get randomly paired up with another undergraduate student at Princeton. Grad students have a separate form to fill out. No worries.I was randomly paired with another freshman. She lives in Rocky. I live in Forbes. For what it’s worth, those are two different universes, so having the PrincetonLunch program in place definitely cut the time frame of our meeting by about, well, ten years. After jokingly confirming that neither of us was a creep, we began chatting about classes, summer plans, people we knew. It turned out that we actually had a lot of connections to each other: one of the other students from my high school here at Princeton is in her zee group; she’s in a freshman seminar with one of my good friends; my lab partner is on her sports team; and she’s in the same writing seminar that two of my good friends took last semester. Six degrees of separation?All in all, it turned out to be a very nice lunch! I made a new friend, realized how small the Princeton community actually is, and learned about the IRC. Not too shabby. So if you want to meet someone new, I’d definitely give this program a shot. 1,970 students would not have had the opportunity to meet otherwise, according to the website. Will you add to that statistic?