As alumnus David Pawlan (‘15) prepared to attend Vanderbilt University his senior year of high school, he found himself frustrated with the roommate searching process.

“I was discouraged by [the website] Roomsurf because first of all, you have to fill out these long surveys which are just tedious and annoying, and second, once you get your matches back based on your surveys, you have to pay a certain amount of money to see a more in-depth analysis and that just kind of annoyed me,” Pawlan said.

After talking to physical education teacher Kirk Ziemke about his concerns during a swim practice, Ziemke proposed that Pawlan create an app to ease this process. Pawlan said he went home that night and drew up initial sketches of what the app would look like.

When senior Joe Levy heard Pawlan was creating the app, RoomE, to help people find their college roommates, he said he immediately knew he wanted to be part of the process.

“I sort of said, ‘Look, I have a bunch of ideas, and I know you’re not really moving forward right now, so I want to move forward on the idea and help you with the financial aspects,’” Levy said.

Pawlan, founder and CEO, and Levy, CFO, then brought on alumnus Jonah Fialkow (‘15) to handle the social media and advertising aspects of RoomE.

Users of the app first choose the college they are planning to attend, and then they create profiles by providing short bios describing themselves and using sliders to indicate on a scale where they fall in categories such as social habits, sleeping schedule and study preferences. People planning on attending the same college may view other users’ profiles and can swipe right or click a check mark if they like another user’s profile. If two users both like each other’s profiles, they will be matched and provided the opportunity to chat through Facebook.

“It’s very similar to the technology of Tinder, but the focus of it is different and the logistics of how people are categorized is very different,” Levy said.

According to Fialkow, the main challenge the three have faced so far is communication.

“David’s at Vanderbilt, I’m at [University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign] and Joe’s in Northbrook, so we’ve been doing most of the communication over the phone or through text, which can be difficult sometimes,” Fialkow said.

Levy said that when Fialkow and Pawlan are home from college this summer, they will be able to make major improvements to RoomE.

“We have a ton of developing and app updates to work on,” said Levy. “We’re really going to make a big push this summer to make the application perfect.”

According to senior Daphne Kramer, who has tested RoomE, the app is very promising.

“There’s a lot of problems contacting roommates through Facebook, like you could chat them and they won’t see it, so the app has the potential to eliminate all those problems,” Kramer said.

Pawlan and Fialkow said that seeing people downloading and using the app has been exciting and has motivated them to improve it for the future.

“Essentially, the whole goal that me, David and Jonah looked at was really not to make a bunch of money, but really for us to learn, because we know this is going to be a great business experience for us through communicating with people and investment talks and the lessons we learn from advisers over the course of the next couple of years,” said Levy. “So if we end up being successful, we’re successful, but I think what we’re really looking for is the experience out of this application rather than the reward.”