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Student-Run Social Media: Make it Work for You

Did you know we here at Duke have a suite of channels branded Duke Students and run by a team of actual students?

Facebook: @DukeStudents
Instagram: @DukeStudents
Medium: @DukeStudents
Snapchat: @DukeStudents
Spotify: DukeStudents
Twitter: @DukeStudents
YouTube: Duke Students
Website: DukeStudents.com

Well now you do!

Here’s how we’re set up:

Student editors posing
Last year’s team of editors
(I don’t have a group pic yet this year because several of our editors are studying abroad!)

We have approximately one student editor per @DukeStudents channel. I say approximately because we have a couple of people who run multiple channels, and our Instagram channel has two editors. (It works better that way for content flow.) One of these editors is our editor-in-chief, who runs strategy, analytics, and the process of keeping everyone on track. We’ve found it works a lot better when we let them be in charge of each other. I’m basically just there in case they get stuck on something.

These editors are paid! We meet in person (or via Google Hangouts for the study abroad students) once every two weeks, but the rest of their work is done off-site whenever they have time. We keep things organized on a team Slack. We try really hard not to over-schedule them. They do a lot remotely and they work different hours than I do, so it works better for everyone this way.

You might be surprised to know that the student editors have full control over their respective accounts. That means that they don’t have to submit drafts to anyone for review, and they are allowed to choose and curate what they want to post! (More on how we make that work later.)

We also have a team of content contributors. They are mostly underclassmen and are unpaid. There are about 40 of them! We meet with them once a month and keep in touch online via GroupMe. They’re each assigned one of the paid editors as their mentor for a set period of time, and then they rotate to a different editor. This gives them exposure to a lot of different social media channels. Their job is to contribute content to the editors for each of the different channels. Eventually, we hire our student editors from this group, so being a content contributor is almost part of the interview process to be a student editor.

Here are the rules:

People usually gasp and clutch their pearls when I tell them the students don’t have to submit drafts to me before they post, but we do have a pretty solid set of time-tested rules that all of the editors know and follow. I do read their posts once they go up, and on the rare occasion I have to ask them to take something down, but they’re actually usually even more careful than I would be with the rules I’ve given them.

The rules go thusly:

  • The “Grandma Rule:” If your grandma wouldn’t want to see it, don’t post it.
  • No references to alcohol, parties, drugs (and no red Solo cups, no matter what’s in them)
  • Nothing dangerous
  • No content promoting Greek or SLG organizations (This is because we don’t want to accidentally play favorites, so it’s just easier to not promote any of them.)
  • No profanity, including phrases like “AF,” or hashtags that contain profanity (like #GTHC and #DDMF)
  • Do not insult other schools, even in reference to sports
  • Follow NCAA athlete recruitment rules
  • Do not answer admissions questions. Always redirect to Admissions!

These rules really take care of most of the problems we might have with what to post and what not to post. It really helps to begin a group like this with the rules in mind so that you can be clear about expectations. We’ve found that once the expectations are established, the more freedom we can give them, the better. More freedom equals more creativity!

It’s also helpful to remember that they are students, and students are human, and humans mess up sometimes. They’re going to mess up. (To be fair, so are you.) So with that in mind, make sure that you have a plan in place for when they mess up or need help and a way they can contact you anytime.

Hiring:

I mentioned above that we hire to our paid student editors team from the pool of content creators. This gives us at least an academic year to make a determination about whether the student is enthusiastic about @DukeStudents or not, and we’re hiring for enthusiasm, not necessarily skill. You can teach skills. (Doing social media isn’t brain surgery, guys– hate to break it to you.) You cannot teach enthusiasm.

Student editors in a silly pose
Enthusiasm!

Other ways students can help you:

If you don’t want to set up social media that your students can run on their own, there are lots of other ways to use the talent of your students:

  • Use them as a focus group! They know really cool stuff. Ask them about new social media channels and how they use social media.
  • Have them collect content for you! Most of them already know how to shoot great video on their phones and have an eye for what will work in an Instagram feed.
  • Occasionally make them do boring stuff. No one likes spreadsheets, but let’s be real. You’re the grown-up here and it won’t kill them to copy-paste for a couple of hours.

In conclusion, students are awesome!

Get yourself a team of them and see how much more fun they make your job!

Our Favorite Instagram Stories of the Year

2016 saw the advent of Instagram Stories (see our early take on it here) and it’s been full steam ahead for the feature ever since. Instagram Stories turn 2 years old today and show no sign of slowing down as a major media asset for the social platform. They have been especially powerful for brands and influencers, Duke included, as a driver of traffic to our content. In fact, Instagram Stories is our second most powerful referrer for content, behind Facebook.

We’ve experimented with creative storytelling from research stories to crowd-sourced content on our Stories this year. Here are a few of our favorites:

Trajan Forum

Working with the Stories features has really pushed us in terms of creativity and discovering new tools and skills. This piece we produced on how historians and archeologists use 3-D scanning to document and archive pieces of long-gone ancient structures really pushed us in terms of how to get the content in the format that we needed. I ended up taking screen recordings on my iPhone of the 3-D scans, moving them around with my finger using the functionality on the webpage they were stored on. Then I manually edited the clips within the iPhoto album to shave off the front bumper that would show me navigating to the proper screen. After that, I exported and emailed them to Sonja to fine tune in Final Cut Pro X for proper formatting for the vertical Stories layout. (This was prior to the resize feature introduction.) It was really great to highlight such a cool story and bring it to our broader audience in an interactive and tangible way via Stories.

American Ballet Theater Partnership

This was one of our first attempts at strategic storytelling using a Call to Action on Instagram Stories. It worked well because of the stunning visuals our colleagues provided, and it paired really well with a conveniently-timed beta-testing of animated video/GIF capabilities on Canva, our go-to tool for quick, easy, polished graphics.

Snow Day 2018

I love this one because it is the perfect example of crowdsourcing content at its finest. ICYMI, Durham had a few major snow days back in January and campus got a good bit of snow. The photographic results were stunning. The best part? Sonja and I compiled this content from users from the comfort of our couches in our PJs as everyone was snowed in for a couple days. Thankfully, our students didn’t let us miss out on content showcasing Duke as a winter wonderland. There was no call to action here, just a great opportunity to engage with our community by featuring their content on our feed. You can see the full feature on the highlight on our Instagram page.

Moving into the upcoming school year, we’re excited to continue experimenting with content and storytelling on this platform.

Working with Students

If you were to ask me what the most rewarding part of my job is, one of my top 3 answers would easily be getting to work with students. It’s also one of the most common questions my colleagues and I are asked about our social strategy at conferences–“How do we use our students’ voices so strategically?” During my three years at Duke, I’ve been ridiculously fortunate to work with and get to know some pretty exceptional students.

Can they be a handful at times? Does it take a lot of time and effort to manage our student team? Is it an absolute NIGHTMARE wrangling student schedules to nail down a meeting time for the semester? Absolutely. But allow me to make the case for working with students–plenty of them, and often.

While working with student teams can be a bit like herding a bunch of overachieving and hilarious kittens at times, they also have some of the best ideas when it comes to content or how to reach their peers. Their opinions on how we market to prospective and current students are invaluable. Plus, they advise us on what platforms their peers are using, how to speak to them in an authentic way, and when and where to reach them. Essentially, they keep us cool and up to speed on what The Kids are doing. So working with them is a mix of:

But also,

At Duke, our @DukeStudents handles are absolutely flourishing and it is 100% due to the efforts of the students who have total ownership over each platform. They’re currently on Instagram (by far their strongest presence), Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube.  There are the formal Duke University institutional accounts that I manage and the more informal, student-voiced @DukeStudents channels that allow current students to interact with one another as well as prospective students. We keep these DukeStudents and Duke University branded social accounts completely separate. Our student team is composed of 8 editors–one for each platform and a managing editor who acts as team leader and analytics expert.

While we certainly give them guidelines on things to avoid and advise them in certain situations, the students have ownership of their channels and the content they post there. We’ve found that properly training and then empowering them to own their channels is a great way to foster the dedication and level of professionalism and enthusiasm needed to see their audiences grow. Ownership = Attachment = Dedication.

 

We even take this one step further when it comes time to replace our graduating seniors. — MOMENT OF SILENCE–

We task each editor with identifying stars from a larger pool of their peers in a volunteer capacity to be promoted to the paid editor positions. The team is structured with 8 paid student editors who mentor a larger pool of mostly-first-year student volunteers (usually around 20). These student volunteers help to curate and create content for the DukeStudents channels and as our platform editors graduate, they select their successors largely from this broader volunteer pool. Our editors get experience with managing and mentoring a team and our student volunteers get to feel like they are a part of a structured effort on behalf of their university with opportunities to play a significant future role in the DukeStudents social presence.

P.S. Paying them helps too. Managing an institutional social channel is a job and should be treated as such.

We also offer them other perks, like exclusivity on information that will be relevant to the broader student body. For example, one of our student editors was actually featured in our top secret project with Apple earlier this year. We tapped him because we had the working relationship from his time on the @DukeStudents team. We also let the broader team of editors know what was coming about 20 minutes before the video formally dropped. Additionally, we tap them for special projects related to recruitment and yield.  We want them to feel important and valued as a member of the communications team for their university.

We also want to help our students build up their professional skills and resumes. We get them access to our colleagues who may be experts in areas that they are interested in pursuing or who can teach them particular skills that they want to learn. We make sure to give their creativity and work a large platform. For example, this past fall one of our student interns produced a beautiful video to welcome Duke 2022 to the incoming class when decisions were announced.

 

Join the Blue, #Duke2022!!! 🔵😈🎉🎊

A post shared by Duke University (@dukeuniversity) on

She created, filmed, produced and edited this project from start to finish. We amplified on our channels, but she now has a solid piece of work to add to her portfolio.

Did I also mention they’re just fun to hang out with? So there’s our approach to working with students. It’s not for everyone but I highly encourage you to make the effort to find a few good ones and see what sort of magic you can make together!

Bringing Duke’s excitement to admitted Chinese students via WeChat

While our team has had strong success partnering with our admissions colleagues to host live YouTube chats connecting newly admitted students with current Duke students, those chats are generally not accessible to the significant number of students coming to Duke each year from China, where YouTube is blocked.

Our solution to this is to use WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging and social networking application, to connect our current students to admitted students from China for real-time conversations.

Regular decision results for admission to Duke were released on March 29, and on April 1 we hosted our live session with the admitted students.  A team of current students from China gathered at 8:00 a.m.  Durham time to share their Duke experiences and answer the admitted students’ questions about Duke.

The response and participation from admitted students was incredible: about 90 percent of the admitted students joined the chat group. Our student hosts had to shut the conversation down after about 70 minutes of questions and conversation across a range of topics, such as finding your “group” on campus, FOCUS, DukeEngage and other programs, when and how to choose a major, taking classes outside of your intended major, selective living groups, how to get basketball tickets, what the party scene is like on campus, and on and on.

Duke’s Graduate School also hosts a similar chat session for its admitted students from China each year, working in partnership with graduate student hosts from China.

So now you know. If your institution is also home to a large population of Chinese students, it may be worth investing some time to tailor your efforts to connect with them around critical points in the admissions process.

Student Live-Chats: An Admissions Yield Tool

All of you in higher ed world are probably involved in the same thing that we are at Duke in the month of April: Admissions yield! We admit our students at the beginning of April, and they typically have until May 1 to decide which of their college admissions offers to accept. We, of course, want them all to pick Duke!

One way that we try to help our admitted students to figure out if Duke is the right fit for them is by giving them access to current Duke students. Our Duke Students channels on Instagram, Snapchat (@DukeStudents), Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr are great ways to reach them, but we also want them to have some real “face time” with our current students. Enter our student live-chats.

The Set-Up

  1. Choose a time. We usually aim for a time when our east and west coast students can join, and also a time that works for high school and college students. (Basically, that means nothing before noon.)
  2. Set up your tech details. We use YouTube Live (Google Hangouts On Air), but you could do this with any number of platforms. YouTube Live works well for us because it’s easy to have our students “call in” from anywhere they happen to be.
  3. Work with your admissions team to let your admitted students know. We send an invitation to the live chat to each admitted student so that they can watch at the appointed time and ask their questions. Send your admitted students the link to the YouTube video, not the link to join the Google Hangouts On Air. They’ll be able to watch the video on YouTube and ask questions in the chat box, but they won’t show up on the video screen with your student hosts.
  4. Coordinate your student hosts. Make sure they know what time you’re starting, and send lots of reminders! Ask them to be in a quiet place with good wifi and headphones with a microphone. (Their Apple earbuds will work.) Let them know where you’ll be sharing the link for them to join the chat on the big day and ask them to join the chat a few minutes early to trouble-shoot any tech issues. (Trouble-shooting for us usually involves having them try a different browser or re-start their computer if something isn’t working. Super high-tech, I know.)

Getting Ready on the Big Day

  1. Sign in to YouTube and get your event going. It won’t broadcast immediately, so you have time to do your set-up before you hit go.
  2. Invite your student hosts to the chat using the link that your Google Hangouts On Air will provide. (We’ve tried it lots of other ways, but texting the link to the student hosts on the day-of is the most reliable method for us.)

    Send this link to your student hosts, not to your admitted students. Your admitted students should get the YouTube link where they can watch and participate by asking questions in the chat box.

  3. Get all your student hosts signed in.
  4. Test their sound and lay down your ground rules. (We don’t have many besides our long-standing “grandma rule:” Don’t say it if it would offend your grandma.) One of our ground rules is also that the student hosts mute themselves when they’re not speaking. This keeps the video from automatically flipping to them if a noise happens in the background or they sneeze or something.

During the Chat

  1. Once you start broadcasting, turn off your own video and sound so that it’s just your student hosts who are showing up on the screen. You may also want to change your cameraman settings so that you’re only broadcasting the large video that you see to your audience, and hiding the other thumbnail video feeds. (If your student hosts are goofing around when they’re not the ones talking, this keeps them off the screen!)
  2. I keep open my Google Hangouts On Air window and also open the YouTube window with the chat in it. This is where your admitted students will be asking questions. If you don’t have a question right away, don’t panic! It’s best to have a few frequently asked questions to start with, just in case the chat starts slow.
  3. As the questions come in, I paste them into the Google Hangouts On Air chat for the student hosts. This keeps the student hosts from having to flip back and forth to the YouTube window, and since I’m not talking on the chat, I can field questions and put them in a good order for them to answer. I’m basically the silent question moderator.
  4. Set an end time or stop when the questions stop. We can usually go for a solid hour before the student hosts get tired, so we say we’ll go for an hour unless we run out of questions. We often have more questions than we can answer in an hour!

Extra Tips

  1. Vet your student hosts before-hand. I pick students I already know are enthusiastic, good on camera, friendly and reliable.
  2. Practice! Run a test YouTube Live if you haven’t done it before, preferably on your personal channel or on a test channel somewhere.
  3. Don’t panic. It’s live and sometimes stuff happens live. Someone’s wifi will cut out or there will be some weird background noise or a host of other weird issues. Roll with it. Your audience knows it’s live and they’ll understand some hiccups.
  4. Re-use it when you’re done! We caption our student chats and re-share them for admitted students who may have missed out on the live chat. In fact, most of our views come from people re-watching the chats on YouTube.
  5. Have fun! It’s a cool, great way to connect with your admitted students and share your enthusiasm with them.

Our latest student chat is below, and if you’d like to see one live, our next one will be April 18 at 8 pm EST.

How Duke Welcomed the Class of 2022

Welcome, welcome, welcome!

When the early decision deadline was approaching, Duke’s communications team asked me to come up with an idea to welcome the class in a friendly, fun way. I spent hours on Youtube watching other admissions videos, figuring out if there was a perfect recipe to get people excited for a school I already loved so much. It seemed impossible to nail down a video – there were so many different videos online, I had no idea how to replicate.

I realized, though, that I shouldn’t be replicating – that different videos reflected schools’ personalities. The engineering schools boasted crazy tech videos. At arts schools, dancers leaped across the screen in perfect pirouettes.

 

But, Duke has a little bit of everything. So what makes us different?

 

I thought back to why I came to Duke in the first place. And it clicked – it was the people.

It was this beautiful sense of community that drew me into Duke in the first place, that embraced me with open arms, that made my first moments on campus feel like I was sliding into a warm, comfy sweater that I had owned my whole life. And it’s this sense of community that makes Duke different than any other school out there.

I wanted to capture that in a video. A video that screamed at new students, “Hello!  This is what you get at Duke. You get these people, this family. And you’re going to love it!”

https://www.instagram.com/p/Bcs7ZngDahk/?taken-by=dukeuniversity

There started my week of walking around campus with my camera. I’d see my friends, and before they could even say hello to me, I’d ask, “Hey, could I borrow you for a second? Could you just say ‘Welcome to Duke’ on camera for me?”’ Their eyebrows would initially furrow, but the look of confusion would be replaced in seconds by a look of genuine happiness, often excitement. “Of course,” almost every person would echo back to me as they got ready for their closeup.

And that’s the beauty of media, especially social media. Sure, social media lets us connect with old friends and new friends, share spring break pictures and tweet funny jokes for friends, but at the crux of it all, it’s about people connecting with people. This video not only gave me an opportunity to connect with the incoming students but also created a bridge for new students to connect with each other and their future home.

 

Challenges

Getting people to participate was, like I said, easy – everyone wanted to welcome new students. The editing, however, proved time-consuming, and I worked on the video over the course of two weeks. My two major challenges:  

  1. Music. For making videos, sometimes half the battle is finding the right music for the background. The music has to match the mood, or else, one risks ruining a video. Finding music that encompassed this “Welcome” vibe was harder than I thought – I spent an hour listening to different instrumentals on Youtube before I found something that worked. Everything else was too cheesy, too intense, too fast, too slow, etc.                                    
  2. Multiple shots in a frame: there were so many shots of people that I could put in the video, I was left wondering, how do I put in as many as possible? This led to me shrinking and stretching the video shots to different sizes, in order to fit more than one shot in a frame. I ended up doing this multiple times in the video because it really emphasized the idea of Duke community. I use Final Cut Pro, and to adjust these shapes I used the Transform tool (circled in yellow). This allowed me to size and move clips accordingly (yellow arrow).

Overall, this video was a blast to make. While some hurdles cost me more time than I expected, the reward was worth it. Getting to play a role in welcoming new students to campus put a smile on my face, as it did with every single person I filmed.

Welcome, class of 2022 – see you soon.

The Complications of 360 Degree Video

Before shooting with a 360-degree camera, I really had no clue what to expect. I didn’t know what the camera was going to look like, how it was going to work, or even how I was going to hold it. I thought to myself, “I wouldn’t consider myself to be an expert on cameras. Am I even going to be able to use this thing?” My first experience with a 360-degree camera was nearly a year and a half ago. I was privileged to be tasked with shooting footage of the Brodhead Center and thus, learning how to use a 360-degree camera. The problem is, as I said, that was over a year and a half ago and I haven’t touched the camera since. After my first shoot, I could successfully answer those questions that I previously had to ask myself. Now, I can barely even remember what the camera looks like, let alone how to use it. And so, with the new duty of filming the extravagant Trinity House, I was once again tasked with learning the ins and the outs of the 360-degree camera. Lucky for me, one thing that I do remember is that the camera itself was not that difficult to use. The application, on the other hand, is quite the burden.

The main problem wasn’t the camera itself. The camera that I was using was the Nikon KeyMission 360. It looks like a fist-sized cube and has two curved lenses and image sensors to capture footage from the front and from the back. If I’m being honest, I couldn’t even tell you which side of the camera is the front and which was the back. It has almost perfect symmetry. The directions appeared fairly simple. While the camera was off, it said to hold down the button on the top until the lights were flashing (to send it into pairing mode) and then connect the camera to your phone via Bluetooth. After pairing, connect to the camera’s wifi network and you should be all set up. Finally, you can use the app to remotely start and stop filming as well as view an in-app gallery of footage taken so far.

Now, let me recall for you my experiences with the camera’s pairing capabilities and use of the application. The day of shooting, one of the other interns (Katie) and I spent nearly 30 minutes just trying to get the camera to pair with our phones so that we could use the application. When we picked up the camera from the Office of News and Communications nearly a week before, we practiced pairing it with our phones to make sure that we knew what we were doing. After following the steps over and over again, for close to 20 minutes, the camera finally paired and we were on our way. We knew that there was a chance of these complications happening again but were just hoping that they wouldn’t arise when it came time to shoot. When we tried this in Trinity, it didn’t pair. We tried for a half hour with no luck. We didn’t think it ever would pair. So, we needed to come up with a workaround.

 

The workaround.

We hadn’t practice filming manually because we knew that if we did it this way, we would not be able to view our footage in real time. The camera doesn’t have a digital screen, thus, the only way to view the footage that you have taken is through the application. But, since the application wasn’t working, we had to just go for it. We started filming. We weren’t sure if we were actually capturing any footage because neither of us had tried manually shooting footage with this type of camera before, but had to go for it anyway because it was our only option. Then we realized, “the camera must have an SD card!” For those of you who don’t know what an SD card is, its basically a memory card used in portable devices such as cameras. So, we plugged it into a computer and viewed the gallery of footage. It was working! We were actually capturing footage. Now that we could finally see what we were recording, we wanted to make sure that the footage was visually pleasing. I’ll get into how we shot in a bit, but (through examining the footage) we basically realized that the tripod that the camera was on was sitting too low and needed to be raised.

Without the convenience of the app, we didn’t know whether or not we were getting footage. Even if we were, we didn’t know what it looked like. Eventually coming to the conclusion that the tripod needed to be raised became much more difficult and time-consuming than it needed to be. Although the camera’s specs and shooting capabilities are great (it shoots 360-degree 4K Ultra HD video), due to the inconsistencies and problematic nature of its ability to pair to your phone, I would not recommend it as the top choice for 360-degree video.

 

How we shot.

There were a few approaches to filming that Katie and I could have taken. The first was that we could walk around Trinity with the camera on an attachment and film the dorm as one continuous shot. There were a few problems with this option. The first is there would be a person, relatively close to the camera, in the frame at all times. This would take up a lot of space in the film. Also, if we were walking, there would be a lot of twists and turns trying to navigate around the dorm. If the camera is twisting, that defeats the purpose of the 360-degree video because viewers are supposed to have the freedom of doing this on their own. Lastly, although the dorm is glamorous, not all of it needs to be seen. There are some highlights such as the game room, common rooms, and movie theater, but we really didn’t think that people would care about the hallways and stairwells. To get from one noteworthy place to the next, we would need to pass through these boring places that would make the video long and drawn-out.

The second option was to set the camera down on a tripod, start filming, step out of the frame, leave the camera there for 10-20, and then come back in and stop filming. For the final video, we would then edit the parts with us in them out and stitch together this footage. This is the choice that we decided to go with. It would allow us to present the glorified parts of Trinity House and give the viewer enough time to pan around each room, all while leaving out the uninteresting aspects of the dorm.

Using Canva Animator to Make Even More Awesome Content

One of our social media secret weapons is the online tool Canva, especially since the advent of Instagram Stories last year. Our office relies pretty heavily upon the tool for stylized, easy to build graphics, and now, animated video content as well.

I recently had the opportunity to demo the new Canva beta animations tool on Duke’s Instagram Stories to highlight a very exciting partnership between the university and the American Ballet Theatre.

Canva is a great tool if you’ve got really visual content to accompany any text about your story or research that you want to highlight. In this case, we were fortunate to have some incredible dance photos at our disposal. I knew I wanted to highlight these images and push people to the story via Instagram Stories.

Enter, Canva. The great thing about this tool is its user-friendliness. I was able to login to our office account and design slides using photos and text, just as I would ordinarily. The difference comes in when it is time to export your slides. You’ll notice that there is a new option under “Download” in the top, right navigation bar. Select this new option, “Animated GIF/Movie,” then click “Preview Animation.”

 

This will open the Animator tool:

From here, you can select from any of the six options or “styles” on the right for your animations, which will be demoed on the slides you have created. Once you are satisfied with your selected animation form, you have the option to download them as either a GIF or .mp4 file. For example, @DukeUEnergy recently used the tool to create a GIF that they rolled out on Twitter:

 

For the purpose of our Instagram Stories, I selected “Download as Movie.”  Then the file will be downloaded to your computer. Here is our final product:

 

We’re not quite done yet. Because all four slides were created in one Canva document and not individually downloaded, they exported into one, 28-second long video. Instagram Stories will only allow 10-second long clips for each part of the story. So I had to do a bit of tedious editing on my end. First, I emailed the .mp4 file to my iPhone. Then, I went into my camera roll and edited the whole video down into separate clips featuring each slide. I saved each edited segment as a new video file, so as not to lose the original 28-second video. The end result was 4, 7-10 second long videos featuring only one of each of the animated slides. I was then able to upload these, in order, to our Instagram Stories.

The result when it played back was one seamless “video” on our Stories. With the video broken into 4 separate parts, I was also able to attach a link on to each segment of our Story that sent viewers directly to the Duke Today article about the partnership. The end result can be viewed on Instagram’s mobile interface as a feature on @DukeUniversity‘s account.

This whole process took me less than an hour. With a little creativity to work around the Stories time limit function, Canva Animator is a really great tool to easily make videos with a highly produced feel with (very little, at least on my part) video skill.

Even the Trees Are Fall-ing for Duke

Inspiration

There is no place like Duke during the autumn months. Fall is already one of my favorite seasons, but something about fall on Duke’s campus is just breathtaking. Every year, Duke’s social media pages launch a #DukeFall campaign where Dukies everywhere are flooded with vibrant photos of the seasonal changes happening on campus, on their timelines and Instagram feeds. During my first two years at Duke, I never really paid much attention to the fall leaves changing. It always seemed to happen in the blink of an eye. Yes, Duke University is a gorgeous campus, but leaf watching was not on my radar. However, this year I wanted to capture this beautiful and colorful time of the year in a unique way. So I decided to create a time lapse of the leaves changing colors on a single tree on West Campus.

The Process

When I envisioned this project in its final form, I knew I wanted it to look like the tree was changing colors over the course of one day.  So I first found my subject, a sprawling oak tree that stands in the shadow of the magnificent Duke Chapel.  When it was time to film, I set up my camera in roughly the same spot, at about the same time each day.  For this particular time lapse, I positioned my camera at the center of Abele Quad.  In that spot, my tree takes center stage with the chapel in the background.  Then the waiting game began for this beautiful oak to turn vibrant orange.  In the beginning, the process was kind of like watching paint dry. It was slow and not very eventful.  But by week three, a glimmer of hope, as a tiny patch of orange peeked through the green canopy.  Signs of fall at last!

For 8 weeks, this tree project really captured my attention. For the first two, I relied on calendar alerts to remind me that it was time to go out and film.  Every Friday at noon, I would set up my tripod and record for about 30 minutes, to ensure that I collected enough footage of people passing by once the film was sped up. Then by the third week, it became part of my routine.  Eventually my whole family was consumed by the changing of the tree.  At one point during this process, my parents would call to check up on me and the changing tree!  I will say, this project was quite the conversation starter. I met a lot of wonderful people while standing on the quad waiting for the leaves to change color.  People would come up  and ask “What are you filming?”  I replied, “I’m filming that tree as the leaves change colors.”  The spectators were a little bit surprised but also very intrigued.  After weeks of waiting, my coveted tree was finally filled with beautiful orange leaves in all its fall splendor.

When I started the project, I must admit I was a little nervous about how the video would turn out.  Prior to this video, I hadn’t made a time lapse of this magnitude. After I gathered all the footage I needed, I found myself becoming a bit emotional and enlightened.  After 8 weeks of filming, I came to realize some very important things:  First, I’m so lucky to attend a university like Duke. Secondly, patience really is a virtue. And finally, there’s beauty in everything if you just take the time to find it!  Recording this tree was an eye-opening experience for me.  It allowed me to take a step back and observe. As students, we tend to forget that there’s more to campus life than just classes, parties, and grades. Watching this simple oak tree assume it’s fall glory, revealed to me that every moment of our college experience is precious and shouldn’t be taken for granted.

Oh Snapchat, My Snapchat!

I’m a storyteller. While it took me a solid eighteen months to start walking (don’t worry, I ended up being a varsity athlete, so saving that extra energy paid off eventually), talking wasn’t a problem at all. According to my mom, my first word was “beer”. I guess that’s what happens when you were born and raised in the world’s capital of beer, Munich, Germany. In second grade, I became spelling bee champ and in May I graduated cum laude from Duke University. So things turned out just fine. I think.

To make a long story short: Words have always made more sense to me than numbers. The exciting part about writing – at least to me – is the fact that I never know where my keyboard and fingers are going to take me in the end. Storytelling includes, but is not limited to, writing. It can take on a variety of different forms. Evolving technology and the rise of Web 2.0 applications have allowed us to experiment with new types of storytelling.

 

As an international student from Germany, I saw an opportunity in Snapchat to let my friends and family back home know what I’m up to on a daily basis. Seeing how Duke and American (college) culture in general is very different from attending school in Germany, I figured taking a couple of pictures a day and adding short captions would help them understand what being a Duke student entails. It also help me stay connected to the people I left behind in Munich. Over time, however, I started to realize that Snapchat not only allowed me to exchange funny snaps with my brother, it enabled me to tell the most important story of all: my own. Being authentic has always been important to me. I’m passionate about a lot of things and I want people to know that, which is why I want my Snapchat stories to reflect that. Now, who is this Bavarian, parsley-loving Duke senior that is really good at spelling? And how would that be reflected on Snapchat?

Well, there are a lot of opportunities, I can tell you that. Examples of past snaps include excitement at multiple Duke Basketball games in Cameron Indoor Stadium, doing a handstand against the wall of Perkins Library while shaking my hips to Fergie’s “G-L-A-M-O-R-OUS” at 11pm, a selfie with Peter Hamby, head of News at Snapchat who visited Duke for a post-election panel, interviewing former Duke Basketball star Grant Hill in West Union, random screenshots of Bayern Munich’s social media posts (they’re hilarious!), and most importantly: a gazillion Chapel pics at 3am after leaving the library.

That being said, there are a lot of really cool things happening at Duke every single day that are worth sharing (in my humble opinion). I have a lot of school pride and love bragging about my amazing classmates, professors, our basketball team, and this absolutely gorgeous campus.

       

Moreover, my snaps are frequently featured on the official “Duke Students” Snapchat stories. The person who is in charge of the Duke Students social media accounts, Jackson (who is one of the most talented people on this campus! If you don’t believe me, watch this and this), once told me that he loves my snaps and that I’m the biggest contributor. So if you ever watched the Duke Students’ Snapchat stories, chances are pretty high that you saw one of my snaps. Especially if it featured Duke Basketball. In that case, probably half of the content was mine.

Now you have learned quite a bit about my Snapchat consumer habits, however, the best is yet to come. This is where my roommate Eden comes in. You see, Eden and I have the most perfect college roommate relationship anyone could possibly have. We are each other’s therapists and cheerleaders. Some people hope that their roommates are gone when they come back to their room. Not in this case. I tend to desperately call Eden at 2am if she isn’t back from studying yet. There are two reasons: 1) I miss her. 2) We have a bedtime ritual.

Allow me to elaborate on that. It all started about a year and a half ago. Eden and I had similar study and sleeping schedules, so one night we decided to go to the bathroom and brush our teeth together. The next time we added music to our joint bathroom session. At some point I just started recording us on Snapchat because why not? There we were: two sleep-deprived college girls brushing their teeth and removing makeup while jamming to Disney songs in a scruffy dorm bathroom at 3am. To be fair, some people thought we were a little crazy but most people loved it. One of my brother’s childhood friends who was closely following my Duke journey on social media actually reached out to me, telling me that he loved Eden and our bathroom snaps. Now they’re friends on Facebook. See how Snapchat connects people? Over time, we added themes to our late-night Snapchat escapades. I once brought a basketball to the bathroom and pulled a Troy Bolton to the High School Musical soundtrack. Every now and then we ask our hall mates to record us so we could do more sophisticated dance performances.

       

Why do we enjoy this so much? Well, being a Duke student can be hard sometimes. Don’t get me wrong, I’m aware of how incredibly privileged and lucky I am to go here, and I remind myself of that every single day. However, being under constant stress, having a gazillion deadlines every week, meetings, part-time jobs, leadership positions, club involvements, internship applications, volunteering, working on your startup, research, (and having a social life) can be mentally and physically exhausting sometimes. So when we come back from the library after hustling for 18 hours, we want to end the day on a high note. Spending ten minutes in the bathroom with one of my favorite people in the world, dancing and singing to “I just can’t wait to be king” or “Hakuna Matata” to celebrate another day of learning and being productive (or occasionally the lack of the latter) is something I have come to cherish.

Will I remember writing papers about the political realignment of 1964, the emergence and disappearance of female subjectivity in Hitchcock, or the nature vs. nurture debate in sex & gender determination twenty years down the road? Probably not. Will I remember how my roommate and I once put on Panda facial masks and jammed to Desiigner’s song “Panda”? Absolutely. And that’s largely thanks to social media. 
Those are the types of stories we are going to tell our kids one day when we come back for reunions. “Sweetie, do you see that building to the right of that archway? That’s where aunt Eden and I used to have our bathroom parties. Let me show you a video or two!”