It was just after 3 p.m. on Friday,
Jan. 29 when Cameron Allen, a
senior at Laingsburg High School
in Laingsburg, Mich., received the
email he was waiting for. As Allen’s
parents hovered over his shoulder,
he clicked on his computer mouse
and instantly jumped out of his seat
in excitement.
“I got in,” he shouted, looking
directly at the camera he positioned
to record his and his family’s
reaction on TikTok, a popular
video-sharing app that rose to
prominence this past year.
His parents’ faces morphed
from anxious to a mix of relief
and excitement as they saw the
confetti appear on screen, signaling
an acceptance to the University
of Michigan. Allen hugged his
parents as “Latch” by Disclosure
and Sam Smith, a popular song
among TikTok creators, played in
the background.
“I started recording because
my school is super rural and most
of the colleges I applied to nobody
else did,” Allen said in an interview
with The Michigan Daily. “I’m
doing this to show my classmates
they can achieve the impossible
… somebody from a small town in
Michigan can get into these high-
achieving schools.”
Allen’s
40-second
TikTok
followed the script of a typical
college admission reaction video:
family huddling around a nervous
applicant,
looks
of
anxiety
washing away to excitement or
disappointment when the decision
appears on screen. As TikTok
continues to climb in popularity,
particularly with Generation Z
users, it has become a go-to platform
for sharing these moments.
When the University’s early
action admissions decisions came
out Friday afternoon, hundreds
of high school seniors vying for a
spot in the class of 2025 turned to
TikTok to share their results. For
creators such as Julia Heilman, a
senior at Clarkston High School in
Clarkston, Mich., it was like a chain
reaction: she saw reactions from
other applicants on the platform
and wanted to add hers to the
growing pool.
“I thought I’d film my reaction
because I didn’t have anyone home
at the time and wanted to open it
right away,” Heilman said. “Then, I
saw other people make videos and
thought, ‘This makes me happy, I
might as well share it.’”
An atypical application cycle
College applicants around the
world are turning to TikTok to
share updates throughout this
application cycle. Some users have
“dueted” old videos about the
admissions process — meaning
they put an older video next to
a newer video within one frame
— as they heard back from each
school they applied to. This trend
of posting decision reactions on
TikTok became popular when
Tulane University began releasing
early decision and early action
results in November, though this
type of video has been made since
the early days of YouTube.
Admissions offices at schools
like the University of Florida
and Louisiana State University
started using the platform this
year to reach the next generation
of applicants. Whether on TikTok
or not, admissions offices across
the country have spent the last
year creating virtual replacements
for the campus tours and college
fairs lost to the ongoing pandemic
in hopes of connecting with
prospective students.
Following the lead of other
colleges across the country, the
University of Michigan instituted
a test-flexible application policy
in response to canceled and
postponed SAT and ACT testing
dates due to the pandemic. The
early action deadline was pushed
two weeks later than normal this
year, meaning decisions did not
come out until a month later than
they did in prior cycles.
With a public health-adjusted
school year and campus tours
now virtual or self-guided, it
has become more difficult for
prospective students to understand
the Michigan experience beyond
what is available online or on social
media.
But TikTok and other social
media platforms allow admitted
students to find other admittees
and get a better understanding of
the school without physically being
there, according to Olivia Phillips,
a senior at Princeton Day School
in Princeton, New Jersey who was
accepted to the University Friday.
The
#umich2025
hashtag,
which Phillips and other creators
used
when
posting
decision
reactions, has accumulated more
than 300,000 views on TikTok.
In addition to amassing more
than 20,000 views, Phillips’ video
received comments from other
accepted students, allowing her to
virtually meet potential peers.
“I’ve already created my own
little
community
within
less
than 24 hours just from social
media, which has been absolutely
incredible,” Phillips said. “Even
though
we
can’t
have
those
in-person experiences, it’s not
completely lost because we’ve been
able to remedy that with other
methods.”
College acceptances caught on
camera
When some applicants got the
email notifying them that their
early action results were available
on Friday afternoon, they waited
to open them until they could set
up their camera and record the
outcome. Others said they held
off on making videos until after
knowing they were accepted to
avoid being on camera if they
received bad news.
Some admittees took to TikTok
to tell the world that their dreams
came true, but for those who
received a result they weren’t
hoping for, it was to tell of a
dream deferred. The University’s
freshman class acceptance rate
typically falls around 25%, making
gaining acceptance competitive
and deferrals common in the early
action round. In a video announcing
he got deferred, one applicant
asked, “Did anyone actually get in?”
For those who were accepted,
they
wanted
to
share
their
acceptances
with
classmates,
but that was difficult to do with
many still learning from home.
According to Jeanie Chang, a
senior at Northwest High School
in Germantown, Md. who made a
video after being accepted to LSA,
TikTok is one solution to this issue
because it allows seniors to share
their results with peers around the
world.
Chang said posting admissions
decisions to TikTok is less taboo
than on other apps like Instagram
because the algorithm of videos
makes the platform feel less formal
and tied to one’s personal image. In
her experience, TikTok has become
a virtual community where seniors
can come together to celebrate
one another’s victories or provide
support to those who got undesired
results.
“This is one way of coping
with losing out on senior year, and
it’s fun to celebrate with others,”
Chang said. “Even though I got
rejected from other schools, I’m
living vicariously through other
people. It’s just fun to hype people
up.”
A genre of its own
Though TikTok has risen in
popularity as a hub for sharing
the highs and lows of the college
admissions process, the app hasn’t
dethroned other platforms used
to share college-related intel.
College Confidential, a messaging
forum used by applicants and
their families to speculate about
admissions across the world, lit
up like it has in previous years as
applicants began posting their
results to the University-focused
page.
YouTube
is
also
still
a
destination for these videos as
well as longer, vlog-style posts
about the admissions process.
Chang, who is waiting for all of
her admissions decisions before
making a final decision on where
to attend, is recording her reaction
to the decision of every school she
applied to so she can eventually
make a YouTube video about her
college selection experience.De
College acceptance videos have
become somewhat of their own
genre, specifically on YouTube,
and
TikTok
offers
another
avenue for sharing these short,
high-energy videos with a wide
audience.
Because
TikTok’s
algorithm system displays videos
from users beyond just those
who someone follows — on a feed
known as the “For You Page”
— admittees’ reactions spread
widely.
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
News
Wednesday, February 3 , 2021 — 3
Student-run site ‘Study Buddies’ helps
classmates connect during virtual semester
MARTHA LEWAND
Daily Staff Reporter
ACADEMICS
High school students reacts to their acceptances to the University of Michigan over TikTok.
Design by Allison Engkvist
Receive your Michigan admission decision? Time to tell TikTok
As
Engineering
sophomores
Sam
Forman
and Varun Jindal prepared
to return to virtual classes
last semester, they said they
dreaded the thought of being
physically
isolated
from
their future classmates. As
a result, the two came up
with an idea to help with
common problems students
experience
during
online
learning.
“We thought of this site —
it was pretty simple, right?”
Forman said. “All we had
to do was match students
in virtual classes, and we
created the site in about
a week and posted on our
(class) Facebook group chat.
It blew up more than we were
expecting.”
The
site
is
called
StudyBuddies — a platform
where students fill out a
short
form
about
which
classes they are taking and
their personal study habits.
An
algorithm
matches
students in the same class
into
small
study
groups.
According to Forman, about
7,000 students signed up
for
StudyBuddies
at
the
University of Michigan last
semester and the number
increased to almost 13,000
for the winter semester.
“That’s
a
tremendous
amount
of
the
(U-M)
community that now has
people to reach out to if they
need it,” Forman said. “Not
every single one of those
people ended up reaching out
and forming a necessarily
deeper friendship, but every
single person had someone
to reach out to in a time of
need.”
Jindal said more than 25%
of all the StudyBuddies users
who formed study groups
met more than five times.
Engineering
freshman
Nicolette Kleinhoffer said
she utilized StudyBuddies
for her classes last semester
and had a positive experience
even
though
not
every
student she matched with
was responsive. She said
people in her Math 115 study
group
always
responded
quickly which was especially
beneficial since synchronous
class time was limited.
“For my math class, if we
(my
classmates)
ran
into
issues, we had this group chat
where we could say, ‘Hey,
I keep getting this answer
wrong, I think this part is
wrong … what do you think
I should try?’” Kleinhoffer
said. “It was a place to ask
for advice without having
to go straight to a professor
or GSI (Graduate Student
Instructor).”
Kleinhoffer also said the
StudyBuddies
group
chat
was
useful
for
catching
up
on
assignments
and
notes in addition to being
a
collaborative
space
to
help members understand
concepts from their classes.
“If
you
missed
class
or
something,
you
could
get notes from the people
who were in your classes,”
Kleinhoffer said. “Or if you
weren’t really clear on an
assignment, you could ask
them, and that helped me a
lot too.”
Due
to
the
success
of
StudyBuddies
at
the
University this past semester,
Forman and Jindal sought
to expand the site to other
colleges.
“We saw it doing really
well at Michigan, we saw it
was helping people,” Jindal
said.
“So
then
we
were
thinking, ‘Hey, this winter
semester is going to be mostly
virtual at pretty much every
school in the nation. How
do we bring this to another
school?’ So we reached out to
some contacts that we had:
one at UChicago and one
at UCLA. Because they’re
on the quarter system, we
knew that if we could launch
at this perfect time — right
before classes start, we could
give them study groups.”
According
to
Forman,
about
one-third
of
undergraduate students at
the University of Chicago and
one-tenth at the University
of California at Los Angeles
signed up for StudyBuddies.
While the site has a presence
at these institutions, Forman
and Jindal said they want to
primarily focus on improving
and expanding StudyBuddies
at the University for the time
being.
StudyBuddies
will
look
a
little
different
this
semester compared to the
fall semester. To make the
connection between students
more seamless, StudyBuddies
will send students an email
with a GroupMe link specific
to the small group they
matched with any particular
class.
“Going
forward
for
this semester, we did two
things,” Jindal said. “One,
we were more focused on the
community. Two, we were
also more focused on the
actual connection itself. We
are sending everyone a group
chat link.”
This
concentration
on
community
and
seamless
connections led Forman and
Jindal to create an offspring
of StudyBuddies, called Find
My Class GroupMe — a site
where any student can find
and join larger class-wide
GroupMe chats.
“We’ve been thinking a
lot about ‘community’ and
how to create community
in the classroom, and a lot
of thought went into that
this semester — trying to
understand
what
actually
does
create
community,”
Jindal said. “Like, ‘Why did
StudyBuddies work, and what
we can do going forward?’
That’s been a challenge. And
that’s why we ended up, for
this semester, creating this
larger community group chat
— that’s what Find My Class
GroupMe is for.”
ALEX HARRING
Daily Staff Reporter
High school seniors take to popular app to share U-M acceptances, deferrals and even rejections
Website designed by undergraduates reaches almost 13,000 users during online learning
Daily Staff Reporter Martha
Lewand can be reached at mle-
wand@umich.edu.
Design by Cara Jhang
CAMPUS LIFE
Read more at
MichiganDaily.com