On Feb 19, nearly 200 participants received automated emails sharing the emails of the five people at EMU who they were most similar to as part of the EMU Similarity Test. 

The test was the brainchild of senior Isaac Andreas, who was inspired by his intercultural experience. “In Thailand, we had a group of people who put quotes on the GroupMe [group chat] every day,” Andreas explained. Everyone responded to those quotes and at the end of the trip, Junior Caleb Hostetler made a Python script to rank the people on the trip from most similar to least similar, based on their responses. “I was curious; what if you could do that with the whole campus?” Andreas said. 

To find out, he created a Google Form with questions for respondents to answer. The questions fit into three sections: personality, hobbies/activities, and life decisions. After people had submitted their responses, he ran a python program that he wrote to identify the top five similar people to any given respondent. To protect respondents’ privacy, he, together with seniors Faith Manickam and Kate Szambecki, created ⅓ of the password to the account that collected the data. On Saturday, they met together to download the file, put it into the program, and delete the email addresses so the data was aggregated and anonymous. 

For Andreas, the hardest parts were learning how to program emails to be sent from a python program and choosing how to word the questions and what questions to ask. He credits seniors Asha Beck and Hannah Leaman for providing feedback on the potential questions, Hostetler for helping ensure data privacy, and Manickam and Szambecki for their help unlocking the program results. 

Szambecki, who was also on the Thailand intercultural trip, was glad to bring their idea to a wider audience. “We had so much fun with this tool within our intercultural group and hope others can experience it as well,” Szambecki explained. Andreas commented on how the tool can be useful to different groups of participants: “I think it’s going to be cool for professors to know who’s similar to them in upcoming classes and similar for students.” In addition to its usefulness, the EMU Similarity Test is also entertaining. “It’s just supposed to be fun,” Szambecki explained. 

Senior Verda Zook, participant, shared, “I didn’t have any big hopes, I was just curious to see what the results would be.” 

Senior Elizabeth Eby said, “Now that I have results back, it was interesting to see who I was matched with and also that I at least marginally knew everybody…It was really fun hearing everyone on campus talking about it and knowing that I was connected to that experience too.”

When asked about their hopes for the project, Beck and Leaman centralized on connection. “My hope is that it’s just a fun sort of thing that can connect people in unexpected ways,” Beck shared. 

“I would hope to achieve some lighthearted fun that helps give a reason for people to connect with someone else on campus that they might not normally get to talk to,” Leaman added. 

Both answers were similar to Andreas’; he explained that he could have “ranked every single person in relation to everyone else, but it would have shown more differences than similarities.” Instead, he wanted to emphasize what we have in common. 

Moving forwards, participants will have the option to share their answers in order to opt into a second run of the program which will share what, specifically, they share in common with their top five most similar participants. This is expected to happen in the next week. 

As for the results participants already have access to, Andreas commented, “I think the results surprised a lot of people and were not what they expected. People were expecting more shared similarities with people in their friend groups than actually appeared on the similarity test.”