I want to share some of my favorite data-driven posts from the lost OkTrends blog of OkCupid, written by Christian Rudder. If you love this blog, you’ll love these posts too: Profile Pictures and Perception The Mathematics Of Beauty Don’t Be Ugly By Accident! We Experiment On Human Beings! Racial Preferences The REAL ‘Stuff White People Like’ Race and Attraction, 2009–2014 What People Say vs. Who They Are

Ever swiped “no” too fast and lost a potential match? How about swiped “yes” only to later realize you really weren’t ever that interested? Think about the situations under which you make these mistakes. Were you swiping really quickly? Were you swiping while tired or distracted? While it makes intuitive…

Think about your first messages on dating apps. Do you send more first messages to people you perceive as more attractive than yourself, or to people you perceive as less attractive than yourself? Most people do the former, but it may be better for you to try the latter. Stick…

Have you ever felt frustrated enough with not getting matches to just swipe yes on every profile and think about it later? How about so overwhelmed with the amount of people willing to match with you that you start to swipe no on even the tiniest of flaws? If you…

This is a project done for my Human Computer Interaction class at Minerva, born from my interest in designing better spaces for people to meet and interact online. This post is documentation of my research as well as my iterative design and testing process. Background and Research Online dating has long since lost…

There’s something seductive about learning hard skills. It feels really great to add that new coding skill, business experience, or personal project to one’s resume. It’s funny when I look back at my resume and reflect on each thing written. Sure it’s changed quite a lot, no longer boasting ACT…

Plunging out of the door and down the front steps of the 851 dorms, I step into the sunlight for the first time all day. The brightness is intense, especially after a weary-eyed morning of taking classes from my room. My headphones blast upbeat pop as I turn down the…

Being an Explainer is probably the best minimum wage job ever. You’re paid to play around with a bunch of guests in a museum where touching the exhibits is encouraged. Adorning their bright orange vests, Explainers are the friendly face of the museum, there to help guests explore. At the…

My time in San Francisco is about half of what it was at the beginning of this semester. To condense the past four months of adventure in San Francisco into just a few paragraphs would be impossible, so I’ll let the pictures show a bit of that. I’ll focus instead…