Students gathered in fall 2022 for Concert on the Quad. Courtesy | Hannah Cote

Have you ever peered out from a packed Sizzle line in Saga and felt as though you knew just about everyone in the crowd? 

According to the math club, you probably do. In a study conducted last semester called Degrees of Arnn, the club found that 96% of students are two degrees of separation or less away from one another. 

“That means that there is only 4% of people who you don’t know and who none of your friends know either,” said Jack Graham, president of the math club. 

The math club collected its data through a survey that was sent to 200 randomly selected students last semester. Each student was asked if they knew the other 199 students in the survey. Of the 200 students who received the survey, 45 responded. 

According to the results, the average student knows 40% of campus, or about 700 students.

“Personally, I thought the number would be a lot lower,” Graham said. “When we were originally testing it out, I only knew about 20% of the people.” 

Since the study was conducted via Google Surveys, senior and club secretary Emily Balsbaugh was able to observe the results in real time. 

“Mathematically, I’m unaware of surprising revelations but existentially, it was fascinating to see other groups on campus that you have no connection to,” Balsbaugh said. “It was weird to see the social groupings on paper.”

The study also shows that, on average, students know about 10% more of campus than they are known by. 

“Basically 105 of the people you know, don’t know you exist,” Graham said. 

Senior Eamonn Weed doesn’t have this problem. Seventy-five percent of the study’s respondents said they knew him, making him the most known student on campus of those listed in the survey.

“Many words come to mind. Surprised. Disturbed. Confounded,” Weed said. “I don’t know that hearing such a notion is a thing that one thinks. I am also unsure whether awareness of such a notion is good to know.” 

Weed attributed his campus wide recognition to the many meaningful conversations that he has had with classmates and friends over the course of his four years. 

“I’ve appreciated that aspect of Hillsdale since I arrived as a freshman,” Weed said. “It’s led me to interact with various circles of campus, be that working in admissions, participating in residence life, or hanging out with a number of friend groups.” 

Sophomore Matthew Bryne and senior Joe Coleman rounded out the top three most-known students from the survey Seventy-one percent of respondents knew Bryne and 64% knew Coleman. On the other hand, senior Rachel Harvey knew the most students, recognizing 75% of people included in the survey.

“I am still flabbergasted about that,” Harvey said. “I personally feel like I don’t know that many people.” 

Establishing herself as a fixture of the student union fireplace since arriving on campus in 2019 allowed Harvey to get to know a higher number of students, she said. 

“I am always by the fireplace. I have been there my entire time here. It’s a place that I am constantly stopping by every day,” Harvey said. “And oftentimes people are friendly enough that you can just engage in conversations with anyone who stops by.” 

Harvey said it makes sense that the average Hillsdale student knows almost half of campus. 

“We have values that are focused on community and relationship,” Harvey said.  “In other schools, they stress self-proficiency, but here a lot of the focus is actually on the relationships and most of my growth here had to do with the people I met and interacted with.” 

According to Balsbaugh, the hardest part of the study was figuring out how to determine the degrees of separation between respondents. 

“It’s a hard question,” Graham said. “How do you look at the pairings between every person? Even with 45 people, that’s hundreds of thousands of different connections.”

The club was unsure how to do these calculations until Graham and Balsbaugh learned about Flyod’s algorithm in a computer science class. According to Graham, Flyod’s algorithm is a computer program that checks the shortest distance between points on a graph, in this case, Hillsdale students. 

“It was a fortuitous moment,” Blasbaugh said. “We didn’t really have a plan before that.” 

Senior Meera Baldwin, a participant in the study, said she knew the majority of the students in the survey. 

“I wouldn’t be surprised if the numbers were even a bit higher,” Baldwin said. “Since we’re all basically on one neighborhood block, we see each other all the time.” 

Baldwin, who works at AJ’s Cafe, assumed that her job might give her an advantage in recognizing faces around campus, but added that the college’s small size makes it easy for anyone to know a lot of students. 

“You see so many people just in Saga,” Baldwin said. “We’re all pretty much on campus. Even the off-campus life is essentially on campus since it’s so close.” 

The club’s survey was preceded by a preliminary study conducted in person in the union. The math club generated 15 random students from the directory and had 32 students identify them by sight, name, or both. Respondents knew 39.2% of the randomly generated students by sight or by name. However, respondents only knew 10% of the students by both face and name. 

“The first interesting thing that I noticed is that the higher number in the first survey corresponds almost exactly with what we found in the second survey,” Graham said.  

Both Graham and Balgsabugh said they preferred the second survey both because of its larger sample size and improved methodology 

“In the second survey, we said to interpret the word ‘know’ as intuitively as you would,” Graham said. “That might get more at the heart of what it means to know someone when we just casually used the word.”

Harvey said she used a more liberal definition of the word “know” that included people she has seen around campus but never spoken to. 

“A lot of the people on the survey I did know personally,” Harvey said. “But also I’ve been here for four years so there are many people that I’ve seen many, many times – enough times for me to say that I am familiar with the person.”

Baldwin said she thought the survey lacked enough Greeks and athletes to provide an accurate representation of campus. 

“My one complaint was that the sample pool did not seem very wide,” Baldwin said. “It was very Independent heavy. If there were more Greeks, I think that the numbers would have increased.” 

The Math Club compiled its findings in a 15-page research paper last week. The results of the second survey were displayed in a circular graph that shows the lines of connection between each of the respondents who are represented along the perimeter of the circle. 

Although the study is called the Degrees of Arnn, the math club did study campus’ connection to President Larry Arnn.. 

“Everyone knows Dr. Arnn, so in that sense we are all one degree away,” Graham said.