Finding your people at Cal Poly shouldn't be luck. Our AI matches you to clubs you'll love and students you click with; swipe through real, ranked connections built for community, not chance.
My first two weeks at Cal Poly were rough socially. I met plenty of people, just not people I actually clicked with. "Join a club, your people will find you" doesn't help much at a 20,000-student school with hundreds of clubs, it was still so hard to find people who shared multiple common interests with me. I wasn't struggling to meet people, I was struggling to find my people. That's why we built Mustang Match.
What it does
Mustang Match matches Cal Poly students with each other and with clubs based on real interest overlap. Sign up with your year, major, hometown, and interests, and an AI backend ranks your best matches, served up as a swipeable, Tinder-style feed.
How we built it
Next.js on Vercel, Cal Poly-themed UI, serverless functions for signup/profiles/matching. The Claude API scores compatibility between students and a seeded club list. A lightweight DB caches matches for a fast swipe feed.
Challenges we ran into'
Turning "do these people actually vibe?" into a rankable score, keyword overlap alone isn't enough. Getting the AI to output consistent, explainable scores took iteration. Also balancing required fields (year/major/hometown) against a signup flow that feels professional rather than just like a survey.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I got a real, working pipeline end-to-end in hackathon time: actual signup, actual AI-generated matches, actual swipeable UI, no faked data. The matching engine gives genuinely explainable scores instead of just spitting out a random percentage, and the whole thing is live on Vercel with a Cal Poly look that actually feels on-brand.
What we learned
How to use an LLM as a scoring engine, not a chatbot. And that the real problem at a big school isn't too few clubs or people, it's no fast way to find the right ones.
What's next for Mustang Match
Real accounts and auth, a live Cal Poly club directory instead of a seeded list, group matches (not just 1:1), and eventually opening it up beyond Cal Poly to any campus with the same "thousands of people, no idea who to talk to" problem.
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