Are you a Dickinsonian looking for love? MOB put out a Google Form with the intention of matching up lonely Dickinson students for Valentine’s Day. The form asked students if they are looking for a friend, a date, or “IDK.” It asked students to rank their feelings on a scale of one to five regarding certain key statements such as “I value communication and honesty in a relationship” and “Cats >>>>> Dogs.”

In participating in the questionnaire, students got matched on Friday, Feb. 10, and were encouraged to attend a dinner on that same night. 125 students filled out the form, most of which identified as female, and about 97 people RSVP’d to the Valentines Day dinner. 

The 125 responses to the Google Form were run through an algorithm and then students were matched up with other students. “I found the differences between a student’s answer (answer to each question ranged from 0 to 5, strongly agree to strongly disagree) and other students’ answers, created an undirected-weighted-graph where the edges of graph where the sum of the differences between two students and ran Hungarian algorithm to fairly match the students,” said Marcel Lee ’24 who made the matching algorithm.

Karuna Gauchan ’24, who is one of MOB’s weekend events chairs along with Abhik Shrestha ’25, said “We usually have events every other week. We wanted to do a Valentine’s Day themed event and initially we were just thinking about doing a nice dinner with good food.” Gauchan explained “Both Abhik and I are also AAAC (Asian and Asian-American Collective) exec members, and another exec member (Nina Lo ’23) mentioned that AAAC had collaborated with MOB before to do match making for Valentine’s Day.”

She went on to say, “We got inspired by that and did a two-part event — first the questionnaire match making and then a dinner where people could meet their potential matches like going on a date. We did not want people to feel obligated to come with their match, so we made the dinner open to everybody.”

Roland Locke ’25 did not receive a match :“Felt pretty s—” he said. “I at least wanted someone to talk to that night. Or someone I could giggle about getting matched with. But it wasn’t all that bad. I went to the dinner with friends who did get matched but they didn’t really hangout with their dates. So it was kind of reassuring” he said. 

Ivy Johnson ’24 was not quite sure what she wanted out of the event. She went to the dinner with her housemates and friends and  “of the people that I went [with] I believe only one person actually talked to their match.” She explained that “I did not see my match. It would have been, I believe, a bit of an awkward situation on account of the match knew my roommate… But that’s not on MOB, … that’s on it being a small school.” Johnson said “I mostly wanted the free food… I had fun [at the dinner], I liked the breadsticks.”