By LuAnn Bishop
May 19, 2021
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Ileana Valdez
Last spring, when college students found themselves isolated in quarantine, Ileana Valdez made a light-hearted offer to create a digital tool matching singles for blind dates or conversation. It quickly blew up into a full-fledged dating app, OKZoomer, which was featured in Rolling Stone and other national media. It now has 30,000 registrants.
For Valdez, the experience revealed the “beautiful potential for using technology for social relationships nowadays.” “Our research shows that people in my generation especially are very open to online-first relationships,” said Valdez, a computer science (CS) major from Red Oak, Texas, who launched the venture with fellow Yale CS major Patrycja Gorsk, and her brother Jorge Valdez, also a computer scientist.