Student-developed Strangers app targets loneliness epidemic, one plate at a time
March 4, 2026
Like a lot of great ideas, the idea of an app that connects people through meals started, well, over a meal.
Ivy Tran, a senior at Brandeis and co-founder of the Strangers app, said she was eating in the Sherman dining hall with some friends when they noticed that there were a lot of students eating alone, even upperclassmen.
It got them thinking: beyond clubs or sports teams, there weren’t many other ways for college students to make friends or even just break bread with good company.
“In startup culture they have the ‘napkin idea,’” Tran said. “It was the same thing with us, except it was in the dining hall. We knew what it felt like to eat alone, and wanted to help people find someone to share a meal with to make them feel part of something.”
That’s when the beginnings of the Strangers app started to take shape. Tran and her partners, Gerald Deng ‘25, and recent graduate Sherren Jie got to work designing and building a simple website that matches students for meals according to their availability.
In the spring 2025 semester, more than 200 students started using the website, and over the summer, armed with seed funding from the School of Business and Economics, the team recently launched an app version of Strangers.
In addition to their availability, the app asks users a few basic questions to try to ensure a good match. There are a few preference-style questions, like whether the user prefers long or short conversations, what sense of humor they like, and their musical interests. When a match is made, students get the chance to connect before the meetup to ask any last-minute questions; it can have the effect of taking the pressure off a little bit, too, Tran said.
Within just a few days of the app’s launch at the end of the fall semester, more than 70 students signed up, and Tran expects those numbers to continue to grow. The loneliness epidemic has become a more widely recognized phenomenon in recent years, and it can be hard for college students to make friends. Tran said Strangers offers a way for students who are not quite sure where they fit in a chance to find their people.
“We realized that after COVID-19, a lot of students had missed out on crucial opportunities to build those friend-making skills,” she said. “It led to a lot of students just not feeling connected.”
She said the app could improve user mental health and wellbeing, and could indirectly impact student retention efforts, since students who feel like they have personal connections in college are more likely to stay.
First-year student Linh Nguyen said the app directly addresses an unspoken pressure many students feel during their first year.
“There’s this quiet pressure that if you don’t find your group during orientation week, you’ve somehow fallen behind,” Linh said. “This pressure can make finding friends feel like networking instead of actually connecting.”
By starting to host events for Strangers as a Brandeis campus representative, Linh not only strengthened her organizational and communication skills, but also helped create spaces where real, person-to-person connections could happen.
What’s next? Tran said the team has been marketing the app to other schools in the area and beyond, and said students at other colleges have expressed interest in developing their own Strangers communities. She said the idea is to expand as users go through college to include a version of the app for alumni connections and even intern networks, while staying true to the original idea of alleviating loneliness through food, or just a cup of coffee.
