Photo courtesy of Colleen Boggs.
Colleen Boggs ’23 @colleenboggs
I don’t think it was really intentional. I started gaining an audience in the summer of 2020. I would make TikToks with my sister, funny dances, the ones that everyone makes, but in the summer of 2020 I redid my room at home, and I had a really cute room. I would make videos showing my room off, and that is what kick started my TikTok account.
There have been a couple videos that went viral. There were two videos that I made with my sister, random funny ones. Ever since I have done TikTok more intentionally, there was a video with a fall filter that I put on my room because I have a very decorated room. I also did the ‘I am woman’ picture challenge, which is my most crazy successful video that I have done. It got almost three million views. It was also overwhelming. Everyone was very nice in the comments.
People will tell me that I inspire them or that they enjoy my posts. It’s so weird that people enjoy my content. It’s really cool just knowing that I can brighten someone’s day or make them think about something in a different way.
Photo courtesy of Grace Fang.
Grace Fang ’23 @gratorade @disgracist
Right now I’m looking to really expand on making more videos about food science and politics. I know before I made a lot of videos about leftist politics and feminism and general life advice, but … I don’t like dealing with so much vitriol and controversy and I don’t want to feel like I’m using and exploiting that controversy and exploiting people’s real issues and problems to get clout. So I really want to start talking about what I’m genuinely interested in and passionate about, even outside of ‘advocacy’ I just love talking about food science and food politics and so that’s what I’m planning on doing after I come back from hiatus.
I really stopped for a long time because I wasn’t getting any joy out of it … like this is becoming a chore, it feels like an obligation. Now I’ve sort of reset my mindset. I’m like, no, I want to talk about what I’m interested in. I don’t want to engage with negative people and hopefully once I start to get some time, I’ll really start to actually take time out of my day for content creation, and maybe pursue something more serious and professional.
Photo courtesy of Meiya Sparks Lin.
Meiya Sparks Lin ’22 @meiyarose
Something that I really enjoy about TikTok is that I can post about things that I’m really passionate about that are kind of random, and people will be like, oh, that’s so cool! So I posted a little bit on my thesis, which is about Cyborgs and Techno-Orientalism. It’s just something that I enjoy talking about 24/7 and to be able to talk to like 300,000 people about it is kind of incredible.
Most of the time I’ll make videos because I’m like, oh, there’s this thing that I’ve been thinking about a lot. I want to hear what other people are saying about it, and what other people think. I want to share my thoughts on it.
I definitely have a lot of people on Tik Tok who I’m friends with and who I really admire or people who I used to follow on Pinterest or something like that in 2015, and now we’re friends which is wild … I think that that has been the most valuable thing about TikTok, that I get to hang out with all these cool people and by hang out I mean I just comment on their videos. I do do brand sponsorships. I am sponsored by NYX Cosmetics. I would prefer not to, but it’s kind of impossible to make money from the creator fund. I don’t really want to ask my followers for money because they’re probably in the same financial situation that I’m in.
Photo courtesy of Andy Arrangoiz.
Andy Arrangoiz ‘22 @quitecurly
I’d say I go back and forth between considering art a hobby and a vocation, and I guess time will tell me the answer at some point. While I’m at Wellesley I tend to be quite inactive on my art social media, which is something I wish I was better at keeping up with! Lockdown did wonders for my online presence.
I don’t think I have a niche, really, or at least I associate that word with a certain level of quirkiness and/or specificity that I simply don’t think I possess. I think I obviously have a certain audience, and that is one that is interested in art, because what I post is art.
I don’t love much of the art I share on my social media accounts (there’s stuff I don’t share that I like more), and I’m constantly grappling with the internal dissonance between what I want to create and what gets attention.
