In March we took the idea out of the lab and into a room full of educators. At the Rosa Bruno-Jofré Symposium in Education at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada, we presented CampusConnected, a version of Everconnected built specifically for university students.
Universities are, on paper, some of the most connected places on earth: thousands of people the same age, in the same place, at the same time. And yet loneliness on campus is widespread, and it often hits hardest exactly where you would least expect it, among the international and graduate students who have travelled furthest from home to be there. The poster asked a deceptively simple question of higher education: what if belonging, and not only grades, were something we designed for?
CampusConnected took the core of Everconnected, matching people on what they value and giving them one real one-to-one conversation, and pointed it squarely at student life: orientation, the lonely first term, the gap between a hundred acquaintances and a single real friend. Presenting it to educators rather than investors mattered to us. It kept the work honest, and rooted in the place where the need is easiest to see and hardest to ignore.