In 1966, Shelley was working as a part-time Ford model and was a Smith college undergrad. That year, she participated in Operation Match, a computer dating service which was gaining popularity in college campuses around the US. Harvard undergraduates Jeff Tarr and Vaughn Morrill came up with the system and Gene Shalit wrote about it in Look magazine's February 22, 1966 issue - Shelley appeared on the cover along with Robert Frost. Shelley and two other Smith undergrads "larked through" a weekend with their computerized dates and tested the effectivity the newest kind of dating service. Shalit's writeup brought a lot of attention to Operation Match and Jeff Tarr cites the writeup as a contributor to the success of the dating service. The Curiosity Cabinet recently featured the 1966 Look issue in one of its posts (as a sort of tribute to Gene Shalit who recently passed away) called New Dating Craze Sweeps the Campus - by Jeffrey Rubel.
