With 1,962 submissions and counting, many Flyers have been matched up with their “soulmates,” according to the Marriage Pact that floated around campus last week.
In the first three days of the pact being out, 1 in every 6 UD students had participated. Once someone has taken the pact, they will receive an email. In that email, the students have an option to anonymously send an email to someone they have been crushing on to have them take the pact to see if fate might put you two together.
The Marriage Pact is responsible for matching up 91,432 pairs at colleges all over the country, and it has made its way to Dayton. Using everything from market design to academic theory to computer science, a questionnaire was created that pairs students with their “perfect” match down to the percent. CLICK HERE
Three UD seniors make up the team that launched the pact at UD. Two of the seniors are business students, while the third is a communication major.
These three individuals have brought something to campus that seems to have become very successful overnight. After only eight hours being live, the pact had gathered over 650 student participants.
The team helped to explain what exactly The Marriage Pact is.
"The Marriage Pact originated with one crazy idea — it sucks to try and meet the right person for you in college when everyone’s been telling you it’s the best time to meet the right person for you,” one of the seniors said. “We expedite the process by giving you the name of the person who would make the best possible future [significant other] for you out of everyone on campus.”
The UD students running the pact said they don’t actually expect people to marry the person they get matched with.
“The name stuck around as a way not to take ourselves too seriously and pays tribute to the Pact’s origins: Providing the perfect backup plan,” the group said. “Dating apps like Tinder and Bumble are saturated with dozens of good matches to choose from. The Marriage Pact mission is to provide participants with their best, most optimal match."
When speaking with one of the launch team members, they made clear the inspiration behind the pact.
"I always thought it was a cool concept and seeing it be implemented at other large universities and have so much success there, I figured that we could also share that same experience here at Dayton,” the group said. “We already preach building community, what better way than to connect people through a quick and fun survey. On top of that, we have had the opportunity to work with students from other schools, including the University of Virginia and Stanford University, to launch this, which has been such a cool experience."
The student community at UD has engaged positively with the pact, according to the UD organizers. Yik Yak has helped the Marriage Pact come to life, due to the platform being anonymous just like the pact. The organizers are excited to see the outcome of the pact and how it might live on after they graduate.“It is our first year doing this at Dayton, yet almost 2,000 students completed the survey in only a week,” the group said. “Hopefully, this will be able to continue and grow every year, and I think that’s something all of us are excited about."
The organizers also explained how the pact works in terms of the algorithm. It is made up of two parts: a match quality prediction mechanism and a matching algorithm.
“The questionnaire collects four types of information, as discussed in our Data Principles and Practices: (1) Contact information, (2) demographic information, (3) values information, and (4) meta information,” the group said. “All of this data augment the Marriage Pact experience, and three of them (demographics, values, and meta information) are used in the matching process—but it’s values information that lies at the core of ‘the algorithm.’
Truthfulness is a key element when filling out the survey, according to another one of the organizers. “Take it truthfully!” they said. “Sometimes, people think they should put down the answers that most closely resemble their idea of the person they’d want to match with; others think that they should put down only extreme answers to force the algorithm to give them someone closer to who they want.”
The group said they have worked hard to make the survey “strategy-proof” to make it easier for those looking for a match to answer the questions and to uphold the integrity of the algorithm that picks the best match for each student.
Those that took the pact received Friday the initials of the one they had matched up with up to that point. The pact closed Tuesday afternoon, but another one may be planned for the future.
The Marriage Pact is on 64 campuses and is responsible for one actual marriage. It’s all about privacy, and at the end of the day, it's all about taking a leap of faith, according to the UD organizers.
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