The COVID-19 pandemic made the 2020-21 academic year socially isolating for many Northwestern students. Remote courses led to little campus engagement, as library study sessions, long walks to class and daily meals in the dining halls disappeared for many students.

McCormick junior Isaac Winoto was one of these students, spending the year at home in Indonesia.

“Freshman year, it was so easy for us just to be disconnected with campus,” he said. “A lot of my friends say it’s honestly quite a decentralized campus, so we really need to bring the sense of community back.”

When Winoto returned for his sophomore year, he said he felt the repercussions of a year spent at home, as many people had already formed friend groups. Struggling to find people who shared similar interests, Winoto wished there was an easier way to foster community.

So Winoto invented his own solution: a community-based social media app called Skuy. After speaking to undergraduates and graduate students alike, he found the struggle to connect was a community issue, not just an individual one. In February, he began forming a team of student entrepreneurs at The Garage to kickstart the app’s development.

Set to release in January, the app “seeks to unite Northwestern’s student groups and keep students in touch with their campus,” according to its website. Winoto said this mission is why he named the app Skuy — an Indonesian word meaning “uniting people together.”

The app’s homepage features a vertical discussion board and a horizontal news section. The discussion aspect allows users to see posts from people in the different communities than the ones they follow. 

Communities can range from “sustainability” to “technology,” depending on a user’s interests. When a user selects a discussion post, they can see who posted it and can be re-directed to the user’s Instagram, Snapchat or Twitter if they wish to connect with them personally.

“We want to redefine what being in a community is, through discussion and news aggregation,” Winoto said. 

The news aggregation bar runs horizontally at the top of the home page, allowing users to access information that matters to them in “one click,” Winoto said. The feature will include  campus event information, updated dining hall menus and news stories from campus outlets. 

Though Yik Yak and Sidechat provide campus-based discussion forums for the University, Skuy does not offer users anonymity, a choice Winoto said was intentional.

“We really want people to have an identity and really be themselves,” he said.

Weinberg freshman Jennyfer Park has used apps like Yik Yak and Sidechat but ultimately gets her campus information from other sources such as email lists and paper flyers. 

She said information on anonymous discussion apps seems less accurate.

“Just because (the app) is anonymous and people can post whatever they want, I feel like I can’t really trust it to be accurate enough to get information about the school,” she said. 

Weinberg senior Shantha Burt said she mainly gets her campus news from word of mouth and feels out of touch with events on campus.

Burt said she thinks Skuy’s success will rely on how the app is introduced, promoted and marketed, because it can be hard to get people acclimated to new applications. 

“You have to get people to incorporate it into their routine,” Burt said of social media apps. “But if (they) can do that successfully, I think that it would be a really good app.”

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Twitter: @cassandraratke1

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