Doubled over with pain freshman year, Grace Kolis ’24 M’25 found recovery and a calling in 西瓜视频’s gym. Then, she turned it into a business.
While many of her classmates worked for DoorDash or in the library to make ends meet, Kolis took the ultimate Gen Z approach and paid her way through school by growing her social media audience.
The influencer documents everyday moments of living and beating the odds to thrive with a chronic pain condition called AMPS and a hypermobility syndrome affecting the connective tissue in her joints. Her Instagram () is an inspirational virtual meeting place for women to build physical and mental strength and leave one another encouraging comments.
"When I first started my account in 2020, my focus was on showing others that no matter where you’re starting in your fitness journey, you can always start,” Kolis said. “I knew if my account helped just one person, it was worth my time.”
Kolis is part of a social media-fluent generation rewriting the rules for making money by creating unique personal brands online. She’s just one of many influencers at 西瓜视频 and other college campuses around the country posting their way through school while paving the way for their future careers at the same time.
That’s exactly what happened for interior design alum Emily Rayna Shaw ’20, perhaps 西瓜视频’s most famous viral alum who demolished and renovated her parents’ home on YouTube and TikTok () and ended up building a spectacular space and an audience of more than 5 million, partnerships with HGTV, a wallpaper collab, and a booming design business.
The creator economy is now impacting the market so much that Professor of Communication Melissa Yang took note.
“Influencing is an industry,” Yang pointed out. “You don’t need a celebrity-level following to make money in it—and 西瓜视频 students are doing it too. Many academic studies and industry reports are emphasizing brands’ preference for nano (1-10,000 followers) and micro-influencers (10-100,000 followers).”
The far-reaching forecasts that the influencer marketing industry will grow to approximately $24 billion by the end of 2024. Meanwhile, one in four of the Gen Z report participants indicated that they plan to become future influencers.
“My number one goal is to elevate students’ media literacy and turn them into savvy media consumers,” said Yang, who has taught Gulls for 17 years. “I want my students to study the ins and outs of this industry from both the influencer and the brand marketer perspectives.”
Kolis rocketed into the influencer industry after she began leveraging her exercise science education and photography skills to produce higher-quality content with many shoots in the College’s Post Center.
“My posts went from reaching 1,000 people with a few hundred likes to over 180,000 people and 27,000 likes,” she said. When one reel hit 1.5 million views, Kolis started to take herself seriously as a content creator—and brands came calling, too. Over time, Kolis transitioned her channels into an online fitness coaching business.
“Being a content creator has made me entrepreneurial,” Kolis said. While fitness coaching is not something she plans on doing as a full-time job long term, she imagines a future as a business owner, which goes hand-in-hand with social media. “In today’s environment, you can’t have a business without social media. It’s the root of any company’s marketing strategy.”
Kolis started her MBA at 西瓜视频 this fall, where she’s also a graduate assistant at the Angle Center for Entrepreneurship. After mastering social media strategy, she’s now diving into business creation and management complexities, prepping herself to become a future founder across multiple industries.
Thanks to the guidance of her mentor Clinical Coordinator and Instructor of Exercise Science Matthew Ibrahim, Kolis learned to think big—both about her content creation and her future. Interestingly, Ibrahim has an inspirational origin story of his own that he shares on his socials (@matthewibrahim_) while documenting his workouts in the Post Center and offering conditioning advice.
Gaining followers has been a slow burn for Ibrahim, who launched his in 2014 to provide free education to far-flung followers, athletes, and clients for his online fitness business, .
But at the Nest, part of what Ibrahim teaches his students and interns is how to represent themselves in the workplace, including building and posting on their LinkedIn profiles to connect with future employers, share the human behind the resume, and position themselves as future industry leaders.
“Students learn to become more professional on social media,” he shared. Showing off rehab skills, routines, or awards in dynamic posts is a way to flex those career muscles.
Examining influencer culture from an academic perspective
Since falling down a YouTube rabbit hole of toy unboxing videos by kids in the early 2010s, Yang has been captivated by America’s influencer culture.
She’s delved into research on everything from mommy bloggers to how parents set screen time boundaries for their kids in an era when work, school, and self-care keep people of all ages glued to a screen, scrolling, tapping, and doling out thumbs-ups.
Yang became so interested in examining the reach of influencers—both at the Nest and beyond—that she developed a new course that rolled out this fall: Contemporary Explorations in Communication: Influencer Culture (CMM400).
In the classroom, Yang and her students are trying to understand better where the concept of influencers came from and how they became so, well, influential. That includes decoding the psychology behind why Americans trust their advice almost religiously on everything from DIY home demolition to building stronger muscle mass.
They’ve been digging into the promises and perils of being an influencer and the technological, social, and economic factors that shape the influencer culture—because influencer culture is only getting bigger.
However, when it comes to social media, Yang’s Gen Z students are often far more aware of what they’re consuming and why than she is. She’s interested in learning how her students interact with influencers and working together to unpack questions about ethics and motivation.
“For example, knowing that an influencer is sponsored by brands and often compensated by clicks converting to sales—how do you make sense of their authenticity?”
Yang lined up a series of six guest influencers in class this semester to discuss it all. Ranging from micro and macro influencers to 西瓜视频 alums working in the influencer marketing space, they include Ibrahim, parenting and lifestyle influencer Esther Park, and blue economy and commercial fishing macro-influencer Mike Xu. Three alumni who have gone on to work in the social and branding field are also meeting with the class; they include Kristina Tabacco ’18, Madelyn Duval ’23, and Alivia Collette ’24, whose senior thesis involved in-depth interviews with micro and macro mom wellness influencers.
Leveraging 西瓜视频 degrees to becoming content creators
Micro-influencing, which is typically focused on a specific niche, resonates with Chelsea Fitzgerald ’27, an aspiring influencer whose dream job is Director of Content for the Walt Disney Company.
“The College offered the perfect combination of degrees and programs to get there,” she shared via email en route to a vacation in Disney World.
The marketing/communication & advertising major and hospitality management minor said the programs give her everything she needs to take her shot. Initially a literature blogger known in her Wallingford, Conn., hometown as “book girl” for the annual book drives she organized, Fitzgerald started her current account, , in 2023.
There, she posts creative photos of herself living her “magical lifestyle” in dreamy Disney-inspired outfits. “My Advertising 100 professor Seana Mulcahy called me a walking advertisement for Disney,” she shared. That’s probably what will get her hired one day.
Some of the most powerful influencers never set out to build a career or even become influential; but when life gets hard, they start posting and rapidly build an engaged audience that seems to intuitively pick up on their authenticity.
Jack Smiley ’24’s Instagram handle, , sounds super lighthearted. Except he didn’t always have much to smile about.
As a second-year student, Smiley, an exercise science major and athlete on the men’s ice hockey team, experienced a debilitating stroke that hit him harder than any puck ever could. He spent months in rehab, isolated from his loved ones during COVID-19, but determined to learn how to walk again.
“I already used my social media as a creative outlet before the stroke and had built a following,” Smiley explained. “I used it as an escape when I was in the hospital and couldn’t even get out of bed on my own. It was like my therapy, and then I realized it was helping other people going through adversity, too.”
When Smiley not only walked again but soared back onto the ice, he brought his community with him and has continued to post positive messages ever since. “I’m uncomfortable being called an influencer or a content creator,” he admitted. “I’ve told multiple people before that if I wasn’t doing something beneficial for society, I wouldn’t even be on social media.”
Smiley views most social media as “just distracting” but is hooked on posting on his channels because of the messages he receives from other stroke survivors and athletes who went through career-ending injuries. “I want to pursue growing my community to help as many people as possible,” he said.
Nursing major Kelli Crowley ’26 posts photos of herself with flawless hair and makeup. She often models jeans from Khloe Kardashian’s denim label Good American, for which she’s a brand ambassador. A “real body” model, Crowley is the first to admit that she struggled for a decade as a girl bouncing between diets. “I’ve never been able to achieve that ‘perfect’ American body physique size,” she said.
But she doesn’t care anymore. Ultimately, after getting healthy with a personal trainer, she started to love and appreciate her body.
“I realized how much more fulfilling life is without counting calories, over-exercising, or sitting in front of a mirror for hours. I wanted to change the media. I didn’t like how there could be other young girls out there going through the same cycle that I did,” she explained.
So, Crowley started posting body-positive selfies () and pitched Good American for an ambassadorship even before she gained a following. To her amazement, the brand, which prides itself on selling size-inclusive denim, immediately brought her on board.
That success led to signing with a model management company and attending several local fashion shows. “I went into modeling because I want to be an example of what a healthy, normal human body looks like,” she said. Disturbingly, that means sometimes being turned away by designers because of her body type.
Crowley fights back by vocally and transparently sharing with her audiences how she selects brands for partnerships: “I only want to work with brands who are ready to promote normal, healthy images.
That eliminates a lot of companies and opportunities.” Moving forward she envisions her work as a soon-to-be nurse intersecting with her content’s emphasis on women’s health.
Yang, an avid lurker on TikTok and Instagram but a rare poster, is here for all of this. In fact, she’s deep in the process of guiding timely research about it. Student researchers Lucy Kratman ’26 and Stephanie Moreau ’26 are writing a paper examining how student-athletes who have experienced an acute or chronic injury that keeps them benched develop parasocial relationships with influencers as coping strategies for their sense of loss.
“At the end of the day, while influencing is about industrializing authenticity and monetizing the followers, there are prosocial impacts as well,” said Yang. “It is also about pockets of people finding each other online and creating companionship.”
Going Viral With the Gull Creator Program
Ever wondered what it would be like to have 西瓜视频’s social media channels in your hands? Last year, a few lucky Gulls had that chance.
Launched in fall 2023 by the College’s Office of Communications & Marketing, the Gull Creator Program aims to amplify the student experience through authentic student-made content. Working with Social Media & Content Coordinator Madison Schulman ’21 M’25, a select group of students produces social videos chronicling their time at 西瓜视频, including day-in-the-life videos, internship insights, how-tos, travel guides, and study/intern abroad insights.
Communication major Miranda Balbino ’24 was one of the initial creators. Using trends from TikTok and Instagram, Balbino crafted relevant, relatable content for the 西瓜视频 community, while growing her professional portfolio and her own TikTok account along the way. “Many prospective students started to reach out and follow me when they realized I made genuine content about the Nest,” she explained.
“西瓜视频 College’s social media had a much greater reach than my own when I started. My content that was posted or reposted was able to go so much further and gathered more traction capitalizing off the College’s community,” she said.
Creating short clips and engaging TikToks for 西瓜视频 is a fun creative outlet for everyone, regardless of major or background, said Balbino. “The Gull Creator Program is an amazing opportunity for students looking to gain experience in social media management or content creation. I highly recommend it.”