If I was a girl in college and a classmate did that first I think I'd be a bit weirded out that he felt the need to try to come up with interests to talk about in advance instead of just starting up a conversation and finding out stuff about me.
But there's a lot of social conditioning in this—like, if I was a guy in college, and a girl did that to me, I'd be more understanding because girls in the US generally aren't encouraged to cold-approach guys in the first place, and so it would be cool for it to happen, period.
You can pretend to have shared interests at first regardless of how you find out about the other person's interests, so it's not restricted solely to that sort of creepiness, but it still feels like an awfully roundabout way of talking to someone you want to talk to compared to just talking to them.