Our Story

Bump exists because I was a Western student who struggled, badly, with loneliness — and missed almost every chance I had to do something about it.

This is the longer version. I wrote it the way it came out. I'm leaving it that way on purpose.

What I believe about students

Students don't need more counsellors. They already know what they need. Some of them are studying psychology.

Students don't need more programming. They don't have time for it. If they did, they'd spend the hour getting rest, or finishing the paper that's causing them distress.

Students don't need your help. They can help themselves.

They just need the right tools — to thrive, to enable them, to remove barriers to success.

Students are smart. Students are resourceful. Students are capable. But they are also still 19–24, still learning, still growing, still experiencing life at a critical time.

The part I find harder to write

I was a student at Western, and I struggled with depression and loneliness. I was never ready socially to understand that being social was a critical part of succeeding at university¹ — as a student, and as a person inside any community. I knew it mattered. I was just too preoccupied with getting the perfect grades, doing my homework, committing to my extracurriculars, and checking off the boxes to learn how to enjoy the company of others, make friends, lead a "social" conversation, run a group.

And it all came due at university, where I had to start over from scratch. No social skills to build the bridges. No built-up reputation to attract people. A complete lack of knowledge about how to make friends. Experiencing that fall greatly impacted me, and eroded me down.

My roommate saw me as a liability and had no hesitation dropping me from Day 1 — to spraying Febreze in my face in the first month of school. As he formed social circles around my floormates and shut the doors on my face, I had a hard time getting along with everyone, and a real reluctance to push into a group where I felt unwelcome.

Unconsciously, while I tried to put up a front, I was eroding from the inside the entire year. That habit pattern carried into second year, where I hadn't taken time to attend to the broken pieces inside, and tried to carry myself like a normal person while, to everyone else, I must have looked like a disoriented robot teetering through the days. Naturally, I couldn't open myself up to form genuine connections, because I couldn't face myself to be a genuine person in the first place.

Being unable to face myself, being unable to make friends, I felt trapped from both ends, and sank deeper and deeper. I took psychology courses as electives. I read books on depression. I exercised when I could. I had my negative coping mechanisms. It took everything out of me to simply function — going to class, doing basic housekeeping, eating, resting, sleeping. Studying and meeting academic demands on top of extracurriculars required herculean effort. It showed up as thinning hair and a visible bald spot on the back of my head when I was 23, in fourth year — that I always covered up with my snapback. I wouldn't be anywhere without it.

I did my fair share of doctor's notes. I did the counselling sessions. I did everything I could to survive. I lost my AEO status in second year — still managed to make the minimum grades to get the interview, which I, of course, bombed and got kicked out of Ivey — and I graduated in four years without taking a break, with an Honours degree in MIT. (What can one do?)

But the point is: I sat in those counselling sessions, after doing well in some psychology courses (especially on depression), watching exactly what the counsellor was trying to do, with my brain automatically putting up a defence mechanism against it. I asked for a session when I needed it most, and got scheduled two weeks later, when I was buried under exams and papers and my time was better spent studying, or attending to root causes I knew better than the counsellor did. I went to sessions where I just wasn't feeling it, where I couldn't articulate my thoughts, where my mind was already throwing up barriers against being vulnerable in front of a complete stranger who knew nothing about me.

I was extremely frustrated, hurtful, stuck — and all of those feelings were directed first and foremost at myself. I was ripping myself up into shreds on the inside, day after day after day.

It took everything to function as a normal person would, every day. Everything to keep myself together in public — in class, in lectures, in small conversations with friends — because a single slip is often a death sentence in a community where we're all connected, words travel fast, and reputations matter more when you're young and acutely aware of your image.

The barrier nobody talks about

In those rare moments when I was secretly burning through all my energy just to look and appear normal, I attracted the interest of a couple of people I desperately wanted to say "hi" to — and was too afraid, too weighed down, to approach. I missed lots of opportunities for connection, for recovery, for social wellbeing, from the people I most wanted to meet.

Because I felt this insurmountable barrier on campus that we feel everywhere else in the world: that the world is not a safe place, that we are all strangers, and it is crazy to go up and talk to one. Whenever I felt the urge to walk up to a fellow student, I came to know that silent barrier more and more. And I understood why it was there. It made sense. Keeping to ourselves and away from strangers is a strategy that keeps us safe, very successfully, in everyday life. It applies almost everywhere.

Except on a university campus.

Where every student has been vetted by the university as someone serious about something. Where everyone is in your exact age group, likely sharing the same memes, interests, hobbies, courses, residences, lifestyles, gyms, sports. Where the institution itself has already created a safe shared environment.

In a setting like that, where everyone has already been pre-filtered, where the demographics are dense and overlapping, the stigma of keeping to ourselves and staying away from each other does us more harm than good. It precludes social interactions, networks, the sharing of information and resources. It keeps students siloed in what is often the loneliest place in the world — where depression and loneliness are skyrocketing at around 70%², three times the rate of the general population³⁴⁵⁶.

The truth is: students are already hurting⁷. Roughly half report being debilitatingly lonely, and demand for campus counselling is climbing faster than enrollment itself — at universities across Canada, including ours. The stigma isn't helping. And the people doing the counselling are the first to say it: we can't hire our way out of this. The infrastructure for connection has to be redesigned, not just resourced.

It’s not just my read. The U.S. Surgeon General spent a year touring college campuses listening to young people, and the thing he kept hearing wasn’t just addiction or anxiety⁸:

So I wanted to build a workaround

I wanted to solve this and build connections and opportunities for students to find each other, and to chip away at this stigma I've grown to curse with deathly intent. Completely destroying something that's etched into every person's subconscious is unrealistic, but a workaround — a bypass — is not.

For all the opportunities I missed to connect with another student when both of us wanted to but were too afraid to overcome the bias. For all the people I could've met and the networks I could've built if I'd had a tool to take matters into my own hands.

What if there was an app where, if two students both have it on, and they're near each other, the app quietly bumps them — and they pop up on each other's timeline, organized by the hour. So they can, without overcoming the huge hurdle of saying hi to a stranger, without being terrified of saying something weird in front of the whole class, without the risk of being socially buried by a wrong interaction — safely decide to strike up a conversation. Through a screen, at first, if it has to be. To start a real connection, in real life, with real people they've already met, with whom they have the potential to make real, in-person relationships.

Not on Tinder. Not on Bumble. With real people you actually crossed paths with on a campus already filtered once by the university itself.

The Western Bubble

At Western, I was also met with hundreds and thousands of people carrying around that Western vibe and Western energy that lifts other people up. The random acts of kindness. The small interactions that just brighten your day, sometimes serving as reminders to push through when you're deep in the trenches of a final paper or exam season.

That Western Bubble — full of bubbly students, perhaps naïve, but full of energy, perspective, and the sense that we are more together than we are individually. I think I'm still seeing that unique Western energy in students today, and I'm heartened by all the ones still keeping it going strong.

I'd love to add fuel to that fire. To create infrastructure, a new norm, and a tool that lets us channel that energy for both individual and communal success — here at Western and beyond. To activate personal networks, vibe up connections and conversations, and create a thriving environment for students to succeed personally and academically.

I want to build a world where students are not alone.