Results of an app-based quiz called MatchSC rolled out Wednesday for roughly 5,200 USC students looking for potential love or friendships while in quarantine.
Match SC, designed by a team of four USC current and former students, is a five-minute quiz aimed to link Trojans together either romantically or platonically through a series of questions. The quiz went live on March 24, and quickly received over 3,000 sign-ups within the first 24 hours, according to one of the four founders Markie Wagner, a junior computer science major at Stanford University.
Although MatchSC was planned long before the coronavirus outbreak, Wagner said that the app may have been even more useful now.
“To be able to provide that entertainment when a lot of people are bored at home, and lonely and feeling a little isolated, was super meaningful,” she said.
Wagner said that after she transferred from USC to Stanford at the end of her freshman year, she noticed that the social dynamics in different student spheres changed the ways she and those around her were able to meet people.
With that in mind, she started MatchSC as a personal project with her fellow co-creators and USC juniors Grant Stenger, an applied and computational mathematic major, Melisa Seah a business administration major, and Nat Redfern a cognitive science major. They wanted to see if social information could set someone up with an ideal match.
“And so through the year, we kind of talked about MatchSC,” Wagner said. “We threw around some ideas and questions that we would put on it. But really, in the last two weeks, we just kind of sat down and grinded out a lot, [with] a lot of all-day coding session[s], just writing the back end.”
The quiz itself is a complicated algorithm that takes into consideration things like sexual orientation, gender, club activities, personal values and other preferences. The questions on the quiz are set up to loosely resemble a personality test.
“[MatchSC is] trying to bring together people who not just have the same values, but also like complementary values, and just generally would be on the same wavelength, or get a lot from interacting with one another,” Wagner said.
Results from MatchSC have received mixed reviews thus far.
Wyatt Kleinberg, a sophomore majoring in communications, said he saw one of his friends advertising MatchSC on his Instagram story and decided to give it a try. While Kleinberg initially thought it was a joke, he said that eventually he found himself enjoying the quiz and was excited to see his results. “Waiting for the results was like waiting for college admissions,” he said.
Some students, such as Marie Cloonan, a sophomore majoring in psychology, used the app with intentions to meet friends she would have otherwise not spoken to. “[My] intentions were to find new people to hang out with in different communities,” she said. “I am really excited to see the results. There are so many cool people I want to meet at USC.”
Other students were not as impressed. Shana de Urioste, a sophomore and cinema and media studies major, said it was a fun experience, but not something she was expecting to get a lot out of. Her match turned out to be a friend of a friend she had already met in person on several other occasions. While they got along, she says they aren’t a good match romantically. “Anything is possible,” she said. “But [you’re] unlikely to find true love on this sort of site.”
Will Berlin, a freshman majoring in business administration, said that although the quiz was simple, the app pairs people solely on common interests. “I’m not very romantically interested in girls that are super similar to me,” Berlin said. “The way MatchSC is designed fails to take into account this likely common sentiment.”
Wagner said that she received more requests to reopen MatchSC so that other people can find potential friends and love interests, but for the time being, she has no plans to do so.
“This was 100% a labor of love for the USC community,” Wagner said.