MAY 18 • 2023 | 81

NEXTDOR

A 

new platform created 
by two Michigan 
students helps 
incoming college students 
connect.
MeetYourClass hopes to 
address the difficulties of 
transitioning into college, such 
as meeting new friends, finding 
a community and discovering 
like-minded individuals.
With more than 150,000 
users registered since its launch 
last September by University of 
Michigan students Jonah Liss 
and Blake Mischley, both 19, 
the platform allows students 
across 160 colleges nationwide to 
connect.
Liss, who grew up in 
Bloomfield Hills and attended 
Temple Israel, and Mischley, 
a Grand Rapids native now 
living in Ann Arbor, both saw 

a need for the existence of 
such a platform. Prior to the 
development of MeetYourClass, 
incoming college students often 
turned to Instagram to find one 
another. This, however, required 
sifting through a massive feed to 
discover classmates. It also led 
many people to make judgments 
from Instagram photos alone.
“It was almost like a yearbook,
” 
Liss explains of the Instagram 
feed. “There were thousands of 
posts for each incoming student 
who wanted to be featured.
”
Liss and Mischley realized the 
system was inefficient, not to 
mention time-consuming.
As an alternative, they applied 
the knowledge they had been 
learning in their computer 
science classes and built out a 
more structured and streamlined 
platform that would become 

MeetYourClass.
“Where we see the true gap 
in the market is that universities 
are utilizing their social presence 
and online communities, but not 
a single university is utilizing it 
correctly,
” Mischley says.
In their research, Liss and 
Mischley discovered that some 
online student meetup programs 
were run by people overseas, 
or even by adults in their late 
20s. It is important for students, 
Mischley says, to know that the 
person on the other end of the 
screen is a student just like them. 
With MeetYourClass, users can 
rest assured knowing that other 
students built the platform.

FINDING THE 
PERFECT MATCH
Rather than simply listing 
students at a university, 

MeetYourClass offers a unique 
filtration system with more 
than 150 filters that lets users 
narrow down search results. This 
lets them discover the perfect 
roommate, friend or study 
buddy.
“It’s basically a model to 
gauge whether or not you and 
someone else are compatible,” 
Liss says. “It’ll look at 
whether you’re similar people 
across a variety of different 
benchmarks.”
This includes sleep schedules 
(perhaps one student is an early 
bird while the other is a night 
owl, and therefore not very 
compatible), shared interests and 
mutual hobbies, among other 
filters.
“It’s very common for there to 
be thousands of people that you 
could search for,
” Liss explains 

New platform built by University of Michigan students allows incoming 
college classes to find friends, roommates and study buddies.

Making 
Connections

ASHLEY ZLATOPOLSKY CONTRIBUTING WRITER

VOICE OF A NEW GENERATION

continued on page 82