In posting the Tifa shot, she had unwittingly sent up a smoke signal to a kindred spirit: “I wanted to show that I was actually a real-live nerd,” said Ms. Nastasi, who is the associate manager of book conservation at the Thomas J. Watson Library at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

He got the alert. “I consider myself a pretty nerdy guy,” Mr. Sze said.

Ms. Nastasi grew up in New Castle, Del., and Pennsville, N.J., Mr. Sze is from Worthington, Ohio. Both landed in New York to start careers — Ms. Nastasi after finishing college at the University of Delaware in 2011 and Mr. Sze after graduating from Ohio State University in 2009. Ms. Nastasi went to work in the Bronx for AmeriCorps, sometimes referred to as the domestic Peace Corps, to help with local hunger issues. Mr. Sze, 32, a senior designer at Richard Meier and Partners in Manhattan, had been accepted into Parsons School of Design on a path to becoming an architect, a title for which he is still earning his license.

Mr. Sze, who describes himself as deeply introverted as well as nerdy, pieced together as an undergraduate that architecture suited his personality. “I’ve always had an engineer’s mind-set but also the creative artist’s mind-set,” he said. “Architecture seemed like a way of melding those things.”

Ms. Nastasi, by contrast, was not entirely sure what she wanted her professional life to look like, but she knew it would have to satisfy her appetite for frequent and meaningful change. “I like to try new things, and I like to go big,” she said. That explains her shift from AmeriCorps to her stint as an event manager for Saucy by Nature, a catering company in Brooklyn, and eventually to the Thomas J. Watson Library. There she acts as a sort of air traffic controller for rare and damaged books, ensuring they are properly tagged and labeled after being repaired and recirculated.