About U-Match.net

Study groups made simple
A new student organization helps classmates meet to study


Elizabeth Celms / The Daily

Diana Yuen, a sophomore geography and pre-engineering major, and Jonah Ellison, a junior psychology major, talk during a U-Match study session in Mary Gates Hall. Ellison wrote the code for the program, which close to 1,100 students use.

by Scott Rosen 05/08/2003 PQ: "[U-Match] gave me a way to contact people other than just meeting them in class." - David Pate; junior, pre-major It's the first day of autumn quarter, and as you walk into Kane 130 you're looking for two things: a seat and a friend. The former is easy enough to find, but the latter can often be quite challenging. U-Match.net, a new student organization, is trying to change that. U-Match is the brainchild of David P. Brown, a senior majoring in political science. During fall 2002, Brown posted in the UW community on Livejournal.com, an online journal Web site, asking people to send him their schedules for a schedule-matching service. More than 50 people signed up, and Brown knew he had found something that could be successful. "We had a group of UW students who were all going to the UW together, and I just thought, 'What's one way that we can get to know each other better?' So I just, all of a sudden, created on my UW server an HTML version of U-Match," Brown said of the service's beginning. After its initial success, Brown wanted to expand U-Match beyond the Livejournal community, but the work of writing and rewriting a Web page seemed excessive. Brown began talking with people about setting up an automated system for people to use, and Jonah Ellison, a junior psychology major, heard about it from his brother. Ellison was so excited about the idea that he wrote the entire code in nine hours, before ever having talked to Brown about it. "All of a sudden, I [heard] that this guy I didn't know got it all completed, and I was like, 'That's awesome!'" Brown said. During winter quarter, U-Match used Ellison's automated system for the first time, but only among Livejournal users - and to no avail. "Just my luck, I didn't have any matches last quarter at all," he said. "I came up with the freaking idea and I didn't have any matches. This quarter, I finally have matches." Brown still wanted to expand the service to the entire UW community, so he registered U-Match as a student organization, primarily for the server space UW would provide. "Obviously, student organizations are there to benefit the students, and [U-Match] is something to benefit the students, so it just makes sense," Brown said of his reasoning behind registering U-Match. Brown also said part of his motivation for doing so was to ensure its survival past the partners' graduation, as Brown will be graduating this spring. "If we have it on our own servers, when we graduate, where is it going to go?" Brown asked. Brown and Ellison work together on U-Match, though Brown has become the more visible of the two. Since the beginning of the quarter, he has led an advertising campaign that has included flyers around campus, speaking in classes and a banner hanging outside Kane 130. The advertising has paid off for the service, which now boasts close to 1,100 members and 16,000 visits to its site in fewer than two months of operation. In the meantime, Ellison has worked to improve the software. Recently, Ellison converted his mother's old computer into an extra server to handle the service's popularity, as UW servers began having issues when only 300 people were using. The co-creators stress that U-Match is not a dating site, but rather a place for people in the same classes to meet. Ellison has also integrated message boards into the site, so students can arrange study groups or find out what they missed if they hadn't been in class, and he plans on adding more functions for autumn quarter, such as a carpooling service and a course evaluation page. "We're going to ask questions like: 'How easy is the class?' 'How many papers are in the class?' Some of the questions [will] come from the UW survey, but (with) a lot more questions geared towards what students care about," Brown said. Brown hopes the added functions will attract upperclassmen and graduate students to the service. "I've talked to my friends who have taken upper-division classes and graduate students, and they don't feel any reason to join right now because it's only a match system and they know everyone in their 15-person classrooms, so there's no real point," Brown said. Among underclassmen and transfer students, though, U-Match has been very active, with more than 50 matches in five classes. Many students are already using the system to organize study groups for midterms, such as David Pate, who transferred from Pierce Community College this quarter. Pate is enrolled in CHEM 162, the most popular class on the service with more than 80 matches, and through U-Match, he organized a study group. "It gave me a way to contact people other than just meeting them in class," Pate said. Given its success at the UW after such a short period of operation, Brown said it is a possibility that U-Match might expand to other schools at some point. "Right now," he said, "we are keeping all options open."

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