Ericka Henriquez
ENIGMA: Who are Yale’s influencers behind the screen?
By: Eliza Josephson
Yale is a mysterious place. From whispers of society parties to screams from the Bass Naked Run, there always seems to be some campus tradition that’s equal parts confusing and intriguing.
Hi! My name is Eliza, and I’m a junior in Pierson College studying comparative literature. I’m one of many Yale students with puzzling backgrounds. I’m trained as a butcher, and I love tofu. I’m Jewish, and my mom’s last name is Church. I’m American, and I went to an international school for 10 years. I quote Proust just as much as I quote Season 8 of Love Island.
I know all too well that there’s a lot more to people, places and things than meets the eye. And that’s why I love Yale. You can never fully understand everything going on here, but you can try! And that’s what Enigma, this column, is all about — digging deeper into these pressing questions and providing much needed answers.
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Greetings, wanderers from the WKND newsletter. And of course, hello to any loyal readers of this column. I’m back and better than ever.
This summer, I did my best to recharge my batteries and shelve my desire to explore campus curiosities. But before I could even enter the Pierson gates as a junior, I was already in the thick of college.
How is this possible? TikTok. For those of you who have decided you’re above the app — are you enjoying little sneak peeks at Instagram Reels and/or YouTube shorts? Both TikTok and those copycat offshoots have something called a For You Page. The FYP algorithm analyzes user behavior, creating personalized recommendations to satiate your content cravings. In a similar way, the best OnlyFans management services use data-driven strategies to optimize engagement and maximize creators’ earnings.
Picture me, scrolling through the TikTok feed made just For Me, trying to engage in some unhealthy escapist doom-scrolling. Only, barely 10 videos in, I get jumpscared by multiple Ivy League fall “aesthetic” edits that move at warp speed through snapshots of Yale life.
The glossy acceptance folder accompanied by a congratulatory letter. The gothic facades. The glowing Beinecke archives. The “Y” waffle maker. The woman with a bouncy blowout buried in books in the Law School Library. The Yale Bookstore interior, filled with navy and cream campus apparel.
In fact, if you search for “Yale University” on the TikTok app, a customized AI description appears, alongside more specific tabs for researching — not just Yale’s aesthetic, but also the dorms, food reviews, vlogs, campus tours, academic stats and outfit inspo. Clearly, the algorithm has recognized Yale as too complex to fit into a single category.
In an effort to distract myself from school, I accidentally got sucked into a Yale wormhole (and dragged you down here with me). Sorry! Yale’s digital space is omnipresent and inescapable.
Be careful, there are cameras everywhere! Don’t get too comfortable picnicking on Cross Campus — for all you know, you could be the next person to have their unexpected “main character” moment on Yale’s official Instagram page.
But what about the people who contribute to the vibrant, Yale-specific, virtual realm? Who are Yale’s influencers behind the screen?
To pull back the pixelated curtain and tell you more, I must get a fresh influencer perspective.
Over the course of a week and a half, I connected with four Yale TikTokers who boast one million combined followers.
Let’s make the digital physical and put the reach of one million people into perspective. Assuming an average wingspan of five feet, if one million people held hands, they’d cover roughly 947 miles. That’s equivalent to the distance between New York and Chicago!
Hand-holding tangent aside, each of these influences posts a unique category of content: lifestyle, food, college advice and comedy. Before we hear them answer the questions we’ve all been waiting for, let’s get to know them.
Hudson Warm ’27, posts lifestyle content with a bookish twist; we chatted over turkey sausage and cantaloupe in the Morse dining hall. Hudson, who is also a staff reporter for the News, shares classic college videos such as “first week @ yale fits” and “things in my sophomore dorm that just make sense” to keep her over 1,500 followers engaged.
“I feel like Yale is this very mythic institution,” she shared. “A lot of people are interested in seeing what’s really going on, and so I think that’s probably why that sort of content attracts so much viewership.”
A standout in Hudson’s Yale-specific content is the Day in the Life format. “I haven’t done one in a while, but last year, when I did a couple … like, they’re honest, but I’m choosing a good day to do it,” she said with a smile.
“I know that on this day, I’m going to be doing a lot of things. That’s not what everyday looks like.” Hudson ensures the parts of her life she shares with her audience highlight the excitement, whether she’s completing a journalism internship in Pittsburgh or writing a fantasy novel in the rain.
Her most viral videos were posted last year, since she has been prioritizing her coursework over the TikTok grind. Hudson sighed. “I don’t really think of myself as an influencer, I just post when I have something to say,” she added. “I think [TikTok] is really fun and I wish I could do it more.” Even if she shifts her focus away from social media, Hudson can take great satisfaction in having accumulated more than 157,000 total likes.
Sanaa Williams ’25, or @cooking_mama2, is known for her detailed and candid food reviews. She takes viewers along for the ride, so they too can explore every option Yale dining has to offer. She was also in my Spanish class last semester, which is how I ended up following her on TikTok.
In September of this year, Sanaa was a senior with a lighter course load. She and her roommate started cooking up ways to entertain themselves. “We thought it would be funny to go to the dining hall and pretend we were food critics and take one bite out of everything that they offered and say our opinion.”
That review of the Pauli Murray dining hall amassed nearly 440,000 views and 61.7K likes. “I was honestly so shocked by it because I also didn’t and still don’t have a lot of followers. I was just making a joke out of trying the food,” she confessed. Sanaa decided to lean into the pseudo food critic niche, and her follow-up videos also performed well.
“There’s two ways to get TikTok famous.” Sanaa says you can get audiences invested by either oversharing or catering to a niche. “I never wanted to take the oversharer route just because I feel like that comes with a lot of consequences when random people feel that they know a lot about your life,” she told me. “Also being on a college campus, even just people in my classes knowing random personal details, I was just like mm, maybe not.”
Sanaa’s online audience might not know much about her, but they still interact. She gets a lot of supportive comments encouraging her to continue, but that’s not always the case; “If I’m eating something and I say I don’t like it, people say things like ‘You’re spoiled!’ or ‘District 1’” She shrugged. “I think it is a fine line to walk, because I want to say my piece and my honest opinion, but I also don’t want to come off sounding spoiled or not appreciative.”
What keeps her going? It’s simple: Sanaa loves eating. “If I could have a dream job, being a food critic, or owning a restaurant would definitely be something up there, so I was like, why not give my opinion? Because for some reason, people listen to that.”
With 1,800 followers and counting, Sanaa’s page continues to attract a growing audience of Yale-interested foodies. “If anyone wants to make Yale TikToks, do it!” Sanaa laughed. “It’s not an experience that a lot of people have, to go here, so I think a lot of people on the internet would be interested to see what it’s like here.”
Grant Tucker ’27 runs a self-described “college advising” account. His first ever video, an Ivy Day decision reaction, garnered 15.1 million views and 2.1 million likes. He harnessed that viral momentum and has continued to post college advice, mainly Common App essay guidance and SAT tips. We sat down on a wooden bench in the Silliman courtyard and got to talking.
Grant told me he was inspired by other high school seniors who had filmed their own college acceptances. While setting up his camera in the spring of 2023, Grant could have never anticipated that it would capture him being accepted to all but one Ivy League institution (he was waitlisted at Dartmouth).
While relaxing on the beach in his hometown of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Grant shared the edited final product with his friends. In a moment of “very impulsive” excitement, he decided to hit “post.” In an instant, 15 million people shared, liked and commented, turning his spontaneous decision into a viral sensation.
He attributes his big break to good fortune. “I’m just another dude who got lucky with a video that got a couple views. That’s really all it is, and I don’t act like I know everything,” he said. Despite an initially limited social media background, Grant is a model and did some acting growing up. “I’ve always been behind the camera,” he stated.
And behind the camera he has been. Since that first post, Grant has attracted over 82,200 followers and gained 3.2 million cumulative likes. People on campus dubbed him “The TikTok guy.” He reflected on how, on the day of our interview, a girl recognized him in Commons. She thanked him for his videos, which helped her get into Yale and Harvard, and also influenced her choice to attend the superior institution.
“It just reminds me why I do what I do, because people literally come up to me very frequently to say you had an impact on my life and that means a lot to me. And all I really have to do is share some of the knowledge that works and worked for me,” said Grant. “That’s what keeps me going. That is what motivates me to keep posting videos despite what some people might say.”
When it comes to content creation, Grant is sentimental, but also strategic. “I’m a firm believer that people will watch your videos if one, they want something [you have] that they don’t have, or two, they want to know how they can be like you.” Grant looked out onto Silliman’s green courtyard and winding stone paths. “I’ve found that leaning into Yale and the old money, Ivy league likeness, works.”
Occasionally, he sprinkles in travel vlogs and fitness challenges (like 75 Hard), but those videos don’t tend to perform as well as his Yale-focused content. Unfortunately, the algorithm desires to overshadow Grant’s personal identity.
“Because of my content style, and the things that work for my account, a lot of it is about college admissions and how to get in, and just about college in general. But that’s not me!” Social media is just one more item in the list of his varied extracurriculars, which include surfing, water polo, playing three instruments and studying Portuguese.
Grant’s parting advice? “There’s only one time in your life where you’re going to be an undergrad at Yale University with these incredible people, and the ability to recount this experience to the rest of the world. I’d rather look back and say, ‘I posted that,’ even if it only got 50 likes, than regret not sharing my experiences at Yale. At least I tried. So, make the video, write the song, paint the painting, do what it is that you have been waiting to do.”
Crawford Arnow ’27 has one goal on TikTok, which he describes in his bio: “Just trying to make people smile!” With daily posts and 58.2 million cumulative likes, it’s safe to say that he has achieved that milestone times a million. He greeted me with a smile of his own while we settled into the Stiles common room armchairs.
Crawford’s comedic and chatty content rose to popularity when he was in high school. The pandemic and online school put theater on pause, so posting on TikTok became his main creative outlet. In his first viral videos, he dressed up like his Italian Pixar doppelganger, Luca. “I went from 13K to 500K that summer.”
“I went from posting once a day to four times a day. I was going live for eight hours. It was crazy.” Meanwhile, Crawford was only sixteen, living the theater kid dream of widespread fame. “I feel like for me, social media was such a big part of coming into my identity,” he told me.
“While social media gets such a bad rep for destroying people’s mental health, for me, ironically, it was quite the opposite. I gained so much confidence and made so many new friends through it.” He continued, “It was like another facet of performing. Theater is so big in my life, so it was like this other way of performing and connecting with other people.”
As a theater and psychology double major, Crawford’s coursework informs his unique approach to content creation. Once he hears a trending audio, he’ll look for the “big, emotional beats” in it, just like he might in a scene in a play. “From that, I’ll decipher the emotion, and how I’ve felt that in my life in a relatable way.”
Two more tips from Crawford: “What I found is that if you change the clip in the first 1-2 seconds, it captures [audience] attention because it changes the angle, so their eye is more stimulated. Also, I always make content with ‘you’ pronouns rather than ‘I’ pronouns because then it makes the audience feel like they’re actually a part of it, because I want to make people feel seen.”
Crawford posts between classes and in free time. “I really make it my goal to post at least once a day. I feel like it keeps on track, and tethered … If I ever feel overwhelmed, I’ll either not post that day, or do a repost of something, or something I had in drafts earlier.” For him, balance is not an issue. He treats TikTok as a fun destresser that remains mostly unaffiliated from his Yale life.
Different from the other three content creators, Crawford shared, “I actually try not to associate too much with the Yale brand because I feel like there’s an air of mystery around Yale. My content is more focused on, rather than being super intriguing, just being relatable and comedic, and to give people levity in their life.”
He cherishes the moments when he learns that his videos have brightened someone’s day or helped them through a tough time. “I feel like a lot of time when I post, I’m just doing this because it’s a little fun thing. And then, you get a comment like that, and it’s like …” Crawford paused. “ … Wow. I’ve made a change in at least one person’s life.”
Crawford closed our conversation with this thought: “If I had any message, it would be, anything you really love, keep on doing it!” He certainly lives by this philosophy: on top of his course load and daily posting, Crawford is involved in four Yale theater productions.
I hope you enjoyed meeting these Yale social media personalities as much as I did. Now, go follow @lilhuddyyyy2.0, @cooking_mama2, @grantucker and @crawfordarnow on TikTok. I invite you to follow their journeys and witness firsthand how they’re redefining what it means to be a Yale student in the digital age, one post at a time.