Leadership Spotlight: Student Communities | Meet Other Students

In continuation of our Leadership Spotlight series, we are proud to share stories from our customer leaders on their impact to help their teams stay connected. This month, we’re focusing on students. We know that student life and their communities have been greatly affected by the pandemic. A quick Google results in countless articles on stress, anxiety, and frustration with this new experience. Unless you’re a student yourself, we can only imagine the challenges and toll on their mental health. Whether attending high school or spending their first year at Harvard virtually, there’s a deep missing sense of belonging to their community.

We empathize with students as they adjust to the drastic shift in expectations of the experience they worked so hard to get. We hear how today’s situation is weighing heavily on their mental health with an increased course load and the lack of social interactions to balance out the stress. We don’t have all the answers, but we have to accept this new way of how we learn and connect will be with us for a while longer. It’s healthy to acknowledge these are real issues and spread awareness. Beyond listening, we also need leaders to step up, get creative, and find ways to help.

Since March, we have made our shufflin’ services on Slack available for all student communities, non-profits, and first-responder teams. We remain committed to helping them to the best of our abilities. We’re proud today to share a success story from Meet Other Students, a student-run Slack community in Munich, Germany.

“Munich is home to over 100,000 students, many of them international, attending several different institutions. Due to the current restrictions related to COVID-19, it is very difficult for them to get to know new people. Especially many of the students who recently moved to Munich feel isolated and are looking for ways to establish new contacts.

Meet Other Students aims to solve this issue by randomly matching students with Shuffl on a one-on-one basis every week. Students have the chance to meet virtually or in-person, depending on which Slack channel they join. So far, over 300 students have joined the community and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.”

- Matthias Heinrich Morales, Co-Initiator of Meet Other Students

We’d like to share their short video below highlighting their journey and impact. We couldn’t be more proud to partner and help community leaders like them.

“The experience with Shuffl has been great. We were able to set it up within just a couple of minutes and the process was very intuitive. The possibility to include Shuffl into multiple Slack channels and to customize the weekday of matching, group size, and the matching messages differentiate Shuffl from other solutions that we researched. However, what really stands out is Shuffl’s dedication to customer satisfaction - whenever we had a question, the Shuffl team was able to help us in a quick and helpful manner.”

- Matthias Heinrich Morales, Co-Initiator of Meet Other Students, Dec ‘20

“We really enjoy working with Shuffl. They demonstrate that it’s not just about the software but the people behind it. With them continuously developing shuffls, we can create more and better meaningful connections on our student platform.”

- Quirin Bachmeier, Co-Initiator of Meet Other Students, Feb ‘21

If you have suggestions to spread awareness for their cause in Munich or would like to help them in any way, please reach me at matthew@shuffl.ai and we will coordinate. If you are a student leader, an administrator within the education sector, and want to learn more about how Shuffl can help your student community, reach out to support@shuffl.ai.

We are amazed at the initiative, creativity, and leadership demonstrated by the Meet Other Students team to help their community in times of need. At Shuffl, we appreciate the opportunity to be a part of a solution to a big problem, especially when this is an issue affecting every student across the globe.

Thank you Meet Other Students for stepping up, taking action, and sharing your story.

-The Shuffl Team