Student-run software development group AggieWorks launches roommate-search app

BY SONORA SLATER campus@theaggie.org

“I like to go out, but I’m also always down for a chill movie night in. I love the outdoors, and I would love to make some memories with my friends this year by going for hikes, watching the sunset and swimming underneath waterfalls. I’m looking for someone who matches my extroverted personality, listens to Taylor Swift and believes in basic personal hygiene.”

We’ve all read Facebook posts on forums where freshmen search for a roommate that sound more or less like this — or maybe we’ve posted one ourselves. It can be a hard task to find someone to share a living space with when, often, first-year students have to choose a roommate before ever meeting anyone on campus, other than maybe a tour guide. Michelle Tran, a fourth-year economics and cognitive science double major and the product manager of UC Davis software development student group AggieWorks, said that she and others in the organization saw this problem, and wanted to create a solution.

“We all are college students, and we all have personal experience with how difficult it can be to find a roommate,” Tran said. “It’s time-consuming, it’s awkward to reach out and [...] even after you find a roommate, there can be compatibility issues. So we wanted to combat that to help students save time, save energy and save effort in a way that leads to successful roommate searches.”

Tran noted that in the past, incoming students have used a variety of platforms to connect — in addition to Facebook, there’s also Discord, the UC Davis Student Housing Portal and college roommate search app Roomsurf. These all have various benefits and downsides, according to Tran, including the quality of oneon-one chat functions, ability to verify potential roommates’ identities, gathering information about peoples’ personalities and so on. The AggieWorks team took these varying factors into consideration as they began to plan their own roommatesearch solution.

“We wanted to incorporate all the best aspects of Facebook, Discord, UC Davis Housing and so on and put it all in one app so that students can have the best experience possible,” Tran said.

So, after months of brainstorming, planning and designing, they launched RoomU. The app’s unofficial tagline, according to Tran, is that it’s “like

Tinder for roommates.”

“Similar to Tinder, we have a matching system where [...] you can swipe through to look at other users, and you match if you both say yes to each other,” Tran said. “There’s [also] personality quizzes to hopefully lead to more compatible matches.”

Users can fill out their profile with personal information like their name, major, year pronouns, hometown, Instagram handle, interests and more. There are also options to answer logistical questions like whether they have an apartment secured or not,