App Aims to Connect College Students With Study Partners

Oluwabusayo Adebayo (pictured) is an alumnus of the Gary Comer Youth Center and a sophomore at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Adebayo is currently in the process of developing an app that he believes will make learning more accessible and fun for everyone. Photo Credit: Gary Comer Youth Center.
Oluwabusayo Adebayo (pictured) is an alumnus of the Gary Comer Youth Center and a sophomore at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Adebayo is currently in the process of developing an app that he believes will make learning more accessible and fun for everyone. Photo Credit: Gary Comer Youth Center.

App Aims to Connect College Students With Study Partners

BY KATHERINE NEWMAN

Subawu is like Tinder for studying, according to Oluwabusayo Adebayo who is currently in the process of creating a revolutionary app called Subawu. Like Tinder,

a well-known dating app that connects users with people nearby that are also on the platform, Subawu will connect students with suitable study partners thus making it easier to get help and be successful in college.

“The goal [of the app] is to be able to find a study partner on campus at any time and when you go on the platform you are guaranteed to be paired up with a study partner that meets your criteria,” said Adebayo.

Adebayo is from Chicago and a Gary Comer Youth Center alumnus. He is currently in his second year of studying technical systems management at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

As a freshman, Adebayo was struggling in some of his classes and found that juggling school and work made it nearly impossible to attend tutoring sessions or his professor’s office hours to get the help he needed.

“I noticed that there was a gap between the students that are successful compared to the students that are not successful in terms of academics.

“I took it upon myself to start this project and I started doing research and I noticed that there are a lot of resources on campus, but those resources are only available at a certain time.

“Tutoring centers are only open at certain times during the week and most of us college students have a lot going on during the week and can’t make it to those specific hours during the day to go sit with professors,” said Adebayo.

From there, Adebayo gathered a team of developers and began to create an algorithm that can match users with a suitable study partner based on what they label as their strengths and weaknesses.

For example, if a user sets chemistry as one of their strengths and psychology as one of their weaknesses, they will be matched with a user that sets psychology as their strength, but is looking for help in chemistry.

Adebayo thinks pairing students up like this makes them good study partners.

He added he sees Subawu as a way to make learning more accessible to everybody and to make studying more fun.

While this app will be a useful tool for all students, Adebayo said it will be especially important for minority students and students from poor backgrounds who hesitate to start college because of the fear of not being able to finish with a degree.

“I realized that a lot of people from poor backgrounds are going to college and then end up dropping out of school due to either financial situations or just academic rigor because it’s just too hard for them to do [it] all at once. With my platform my whole goal is to be able to alleviate the pains that people are currently having and provide a solution to the current difficulties,” he said.

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