When you picture modern match-making services, you might be inclined to imagine social apps that run algorithms at lightning speed to assess the compatibility of two candidates, offering a suitable pairing in just a few seconds.
Dinner with a Stranger McGill takes a different approach to pairing people up: Interested students fill out the club’s monthly questionnaire of personality-based questions. A small team then scrolls through a Google spreadsheet filled with people’s responses, making matches by hand based on students’ similarities and connecting the pair over email.
“It’s very time-consuming,” Stephanie Sartori, U2 Science and Dinner with a Stranger co-president, told The Tribune.
“But once you get in the flow of matching people, I feel like you can get it done pretty quickly,” Erika Kan, U2 Arts & Science and the club’s other co-president, added. “It’s fun because when you find people that are a perfect match, it’s like a rush of adrenaline.”
Sartori and Kan are the co-founders of Dinner with a Stranger McGill: A group dedicated to pairing interested students in the hopes of building lasting friendships. Although some students use the club as a dating service, the co-presidents emphasized that the focus of the club is on fostering community rather than setting up romantic relationships. In addition to match-making, the club also aims to host social events open to all students—such as their upcoming Galentine’s karaoke night on Feb. 15.
Sartori and Kan explained that the concept behind the club came from Sartori’s sister, who launched a group bearing the same name at the University of Glasgow. Sartori and Kan started their own version of the club in the summer of 2024 after recognizing the difficulties they faced in meeting new people once they were no longer first-years. As international student Buddy Program mentors, hearing from many other students about the challenges of making friends also inspired them to start the club.
“I feel like I’ve made all of my friends during frosh, and since then, I’m still friends with them, or I’m friends with people who I’ve met through connections,” Kan said. “I haven’t really met new people organically.”
“The lecture room is not an inviting place to talk to random people,” Sartori added.
For Sartori, the cold weather poses an added challenge to socializing, particularly because it means students can no longer meet up outside on campus.
“With winter and the cold and dark vibe of Montreal, […] I feel like you can feel that there’s a disconnect, that people aren’t as tight-knit as they are during the fall semester,” Sartori said.
In addition to individual pairings, Dinner with a Stranger offers the option of friend group matches, where multiple people can be matched with another group.
“It’s a pretty popular option. I think it’s a little intimidating to sign up as an individual to just meet a bunch of random people,” Kan said. “A lot of people feel more comfortable signing up with their friends to meet another group of friends.”
Taimaa Bachi, U1 Engineering, and Oksana Pustova, U1 Science, are among the students who have tried the group matching option. They explained that Bachi completed a Dinner with a Stranger questionnaire on behalf of their friend group for a chance to expand their social circle.
“At first it was a little awkward because, like, we didn’t even know what they looked like and we just decided on some random restaurant [to meet up],” Pustova said. “Once we got to talking […] five minutes in, I’d say that was very chill.”
Bachi and Pustova also echoed the value of the club as a way to make friends, noting that they hoped to try Dinner with a Stranger again in the future.
“This is the one time where we’re surrounded with so many people our age, and it’s still so hard to reach out to people,” Bachi said. “You know [your matches] also want to make friends, and you know they’re there because they want to talk to someone else. So I think it’s a really cool opportunity.”
