Earlier this year, Farrago reporter and pseudo scientist Alex Epstein uncovered the best locations to find love at Melbourne University. A lovelorn student himself, Epstein trawled through UniMelb Love Letters’ 2000-post feed to produce a map of the most likely places to find love at university.
I was intrigued by Epstein’s experiment. After all, I looked at university love letters the same way—as a cesspool of young adult horniness with moments of romantic longing. Is there in fact, a trend to love? Do the engineering buildings have a certain je ne se quois that gets oxytocin levels spiking? Or is it in the dungeons of the SRC where we meet our future lovers, painting protest banners in cramped workspaces? Like Alex, I , too, needed to know where I could find love on campus.
I surveyed as many USyd Love Letters posts as I could until Google Chrome crashed. That number, in case you were wondering, was 1360 posts.
Out of 301 posts explicitly mentioning a location, 48 were in Fisher Library. My friends have a running joke that the hottest part of Fisher is ‘level sex (six)’—but disappointingly, the data showed otherwise: levels 4, 5, and 9 were the favourites.
Following Fisher, other hot spots included Abercrombie Business School (21 letters); Eastern Avenue (20); and the Law Library (19).
Of the love letters about Eastern Avenue, 8 were directed to student protestors. There’s just something about the fiery passion of screaming into a microphone.
While our data is skewed towards Camperdown, there is still plenty of love south of City Rd. Wentworth, in particular, is a massive love spot, and PNR (13) received a lot of attention as well. (Engineering students deserve love too!)
Westfield Bondi Junction and USyd Cumberland Campus were surprise locations, but the mentions of falling in love on the North Shore and Western Sydney Lines were almost expected. Who hasn’t formed a passing crush on the train ride home? The hottest suburbs: Parramatta, Chatswood and Bankstown.
The most in-demand club is the Sydney University Business Society (SUBS), mentioned in roughly 21% of all letters addressed to a club member or executive. Sydney University Greek Society (8 letters) came in second, but the Highly Commended Award goes to SUAnime (5), which ranked third despite being full of weebs. Love truly is blind.
And unlike UniMelb, which saw Science be by far the most popular major, USyd loves its pretentious Arts students.
Statistically, the most eligible bachelors at USyd are men and women enrolled in an Arts degree (27 and 24 letters). This was followed closely by Engineering, with men and women receiving 18 letters each. The least eligible bachelors were people studying Media and Communications; only three letters were received (1 for a MeCo man; 2 for MeCo women). Sad, but at least they have each other.
Ultimately, I feel like my search has given me some answers. But there is still a lot left to find. I need to know: has anyone ever answered a love letter? How many? Has there been a USyd Love Letters inspired kiss? Inspired couple? When will we get the first USyd Love Letters baby? We may never know, but I do know one thing for sure: all these love letters and not a single one for me.
