If nothing else, the website BrandeisLunch certainly lives up to the description that creator Seth Riddley, a Harvard senior, gives it: "A different kind of interaction." Anyone who has been on a blind date knows the feeling of nervousness and excitement that comes minutes before meeting the person with whom you have been set up. Because of the anxiety that embarking on an unknown and potentially awkward situation entails, many people intentionally steer clear of setups or blind dates of any kind. But, according to figures on brandeislunch.com, 1,722 students have willingly set themselves up through the program and its sister sites.

Over the past year and a half, the website, one of the many versions that Riddley tailored to individual schools from his original brainchild, HarvardLunch, has randomly paired student users with each other on blind lunch dates with the intent of helping them branch out of their usual social circles. It enables users to "meet Brandeis students you might never encounter otherwise," according to the BrandeisLunch website.

The ingenious ease and simplicity of the site is part of what has made it a sensation on several college campuses. Even the shyest, the most inactive or the most cliquish students need only submit their names and email addresses to receive the names of a potential new friends and a suggested meeting time delivered to their inboxes within minutes.

HarvardLunch was created in November 2010, when Riddley said he woke up in the middle of the night with the idea and immediately put it into action. Harvard's student newspaper, The Crimson, ran an article about the website soon after it came out, and within days it became a campus wide phenomenon.

The HarvardLunch prototype is an "extremely simple site" and didn't require a lot of work to set up, according to Riddley. During the beginning stages of the project, he was able to run it manually by himself; now that it has expanded considerably, the entire system is automated.

In the weeks that followed, the idea "took off," with students from several schools approaching him to establish the website at their universities, Riddley said in an interview with the Justice. Since its inception at Harvard, four more universities have adopted the "Lunch" website: Yale University, Brandeis, Princeton University and the University of Chicago.

LunchEdu, the umbrella organization for HarvardLunch and its variations, added BrandeisLunch to its roster a couple of months ago when Alina Liu '13 sent Riddley a message via Facebook, saying that she had read about the program online and wanted to see it at Brandeis. With some small adjustments to just two lines of code that changed the color scheme and the name of the site, BrandeisLunch was created and, at the beginning of this semester, was up and running.

The blind date feeling to the process certainly does not suit all personalities. "Some people find it really awkward; other people think it's really cool," said Riddley.

"It's not that awkward for me because I talk a lot," said Genevieve Zucchetto de Oliveira '15, who used BrandeisLunch this past week. "But if you're a shy person, … you might be intimidated to walk up to a random stranger and be like, ‘Hi, are you this person?'"

Zucchetto de Oliveira was matched with an acquaintance who she had previously met through their scholarship program. The two are currently planning when and where to have their lunch.

"I definitely want to try again," said Zucchetto de Oliveira. "I feel like it's good to get to know people that way."

The multitude of stories like this suggest that a small student body like Brandeis' may not be conducive to the kind of random encounter that BrandeisLunch seeks to generate. Brandeis, with 3,504 undergraduates and 2,324 graduate students, is the smallest of the universities that currently use the LunchEdu program. Harvard is the largest, with about 21,000 total graduate and undergraduate students, and the University of Chicago is next at approximately 15,000. Yale comes in at just over 11,000, while Princeton has almost 8,000 students.

Many participants were even matched to people with whom they were very close. "We always go to lunch and dinner together," said Havisha Desai '15 of her BrandeisLunch match, a friend from her high school. "We decided that we would try to branch out together. We both signed up and got paired with each other," Desai explained.

"We're all very interconnected. It's very hard to find someone who you don't have any friends in common with," Zucchetto de Oliveira said.

"With a more elegant system, [the website] could fix that problem," said Riddley, referring to the lack of strangers generated by matches within small populations. "It could be done a lot better than it is, but it's not something I can dedicate a lot of time to right now," he said of the inefficiency and simple design of the site. His focus for now will be on his studies and other projects, he explained.

Having several options for each match, for instance, could have resulted in a better experience, suggested Desai. She said that she was unsure if she would try the website out again.

The small pool of candidates in the BrandeisLunch system may be due to the lack of awareness of the program, as well as the small student body size. While students on other campuses have taken it upon themselves to promote it, there has not been much buzz about it at Brandeis.

As it stands, it is still entirely possible to meet someone new through BrandeisLunch – or at least get to know them better. If you do happen to draw a total stranger, at this point, the size of the University will most likely work in your favor, as you and your match are likely to have something in common just by virtue of being part of the same small community.

For instance, you may discover that your new acquaintance is in a comedy or an a cappella group that you saw perform last semester, shares your views on Pachanga and Einstein Bros. Bagels's hours or has a common connection with you in any of an infinite number of uniquely Brandeisian aspects.

With BrandeisLunch, all it takes to form a new friendship is for one student to enter her name into a database, then sit back and relax while the computer reaches out to another student for her. What happens next is up to them.