Influencers are popping up on college campuses across the country and the College has no shortage of them. Students are taking to the internet to create a variety of content, all with Williamstown in the background.

‘Picking up a camera’

For Alex Lee ’26, the basketball team’s leading scorer in the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons, posting his “day in the life” videos regularly on Instagram began as a way to deal with a season-ending injury after the team’s first game of last season. “I had a lot of free time, and I wanted to be productive, and I’ve always had the itch to make content,” Lee said.

So, Lee took the leap. Unsure of what to make content about, he started with the subject he knew best: himself. He began making day-in-the-life vlogs of his experience as a student-athlete at the College — classes, workouts, meals, study sessions and occasional other shenanigans — and posting them to a public Instagram account. Now, Lee has amassed a small but loyal Instagram following, and he is one of several influencers at the College to use the platform to post short-form videos known as Reels. “When I first started, I felt crazy,” he said. “Like why am I talking into a phone and putting together a video of me working out?”

Now, posting feels natural to him, Lee said. Over the past two months, Lee has recorded a short vlog every single day, though he admits that he’s a bit behind on editing and uploading them. While his account hasn’t grown as much as he would like, Lee said he has found that pretending to have an audience can be helpful, even if no one is watching. “I’m feeling so much more confident in my own skin, and it’s translated into other aspects of my life,” he said. “Talking to people feels natural, and I don’t second-guess myself as much.”

Lee said that people will come up to him in a dining hall or at social gatherings to ask about his content or mention being featured in the background of his videos, which he said has allowed him to meet new people even during his senior year.

Content creation has also helped Lee track his progress recovering from his injury. “It’s cool to see how, at the beginning [of my recovery], I was doing workouts with light weights and now I’m back on the court running around and jumping,” he said.

These days, Lee is taking a break from daily vlogging to focus on being present for the rest of his senior spring, he said. However, he still plans to create content after graduation — though it might change in style. “I want to be creative and try longer stuff that has more of a narrative component,” he said. “I might post only once a week, but it could help me reach more people, which would be nice.”

Ultimately, though, anonymous validation isn’t Lee’s primary motivator. “My friends have watched me become less anxious and more confident during all of this … so I’m proud of that,” he said. “If you’re in a rut, it could be worth it to think about picking up a camera and talking into it, too.”

‘As authentic as possible’

Zach Greer ’29 started filming videos in July 2025 in an effort to become more comfortable talking to strangers. He began by approaching others in his hometown gym in Gilbertsville, Pa. “I was getting over my fear of speaking to people … women specifically,” he said. “I spent every day speaking to one new person in the gym … in nine weeks I got over that fear.”

When the Record met him in Paresky for an interview, Greer was midway through an interview of his own, with Cree E. Williams ’28 about her experiences doing theater tech at the College. Once he had finished, we asked him about the small black object clipped to his collar, which turned out to be a microphone, and his method of filming videos. “It’s been me and the iPhone, and then I literally just got a mic a few weeks ago,” he said. “That’s it — me setting up my camera on anything I can find. So it’s usually just my book bag.”

Greer said that he likes to keep things relatively low-tech. “I like to do it so there’s not a lot of equipment, so I can stay as authentic as possible,” he said.

If you’ve seen Greer filming on campus, frequently in Upper Lasell or Paresky, it has likely been part of his series on approaching strangers. But he said he also posts videos on other themes. These include “show[ing] people how to build their body in the gym [and] what to eat,” he said.

Raquel Jardim ’27.5 was recently interviewed by Greer on a picnic table outside of the Paresky Center. She said that Greer was polite and asked for consent before recording Jardim and her friends. “I do respect the notion of normalizing conversations on campus,” she said. But she expressed some concerns about the medium of social media. “[If] the conversations are not an end in themselves, it’s just a means to creating your own performance,” she said. “It would be interesting to know the extent of how genuine these interactions are … is the goal to form authenticity or are we just creating another avenue for performance? If it’s the latter, I don’t think that’s what Williams needs,” she said. “We are already so performative.”

Greer said he has tried a range of entrepreneurial ventures, some on social media. “Ever since I was in eighth or ninth grade, I’ve been doing random businesses, like drop shipping, t-shirt business,” he said, before settling into his current gig as an interviewer.

He said he takes inspiration from other content creators like Mino Lee — who runs an online subscription-based influencer advising community that Greer is part of — and his Christian faith, which he said has been an important aspect of both his life on campus and his motivation for posting.

Greer said that he hopes to continue posting videos that resonate with other people. “I want to make that fundamental switch for somebody so that they can be a completely new person,” he said, adding that after graduation, he plans to pursue this work full-time. “This is what I’ll do for my life… I won’t work a normal job.”

‘You’re that guy who makes music’

For Logan Spaleta ’28, being an influencer is a means to an end, not a goal in itself. Spaleta is a musician who uses social media as a platform to promote his music. Running his own publicity provides an accessible way of gaining recognition as a musician, he said. “Social media doesn’t require access to a publicist or management that takes a cut of your royalties, so it’s the best medium to get your stuff out there,” Spaleta said in an interview with the Record.

Spaleta is in the midst of promoting his first full album forever and tonight, which has caused him to ramp up his social media presence in recent months. “I started songwriting during COVID, and for most of high school and the beginning of college, I’d hop on social media around when I’d release something and then I’d kind of go away,” he said. “But in today’s world, you have to be really consistent, so I’ve focused on that this year.”

Because social media is not Spaleta’s true passion, he said he has sometimes struggled to make his posts feel authentic to his personality and music. “I’m still learning to do this,” he said. “In comparison, the songwriting is the easy part.”

Many of Spaleta’s posts are clips of him performing his songs. However, he has recently branched out his content. He posts videos about his participation in theater at the College — such as his recent starring role in the Cap & Bells musical, The World Goes Round — and talks candidly about his attempts to break into the music industry as a young artist. He even makes memes satirizing his own music.

Spaleta said his social media presence has garnered attention on campus. “Sometimes I feel kind of bad for my friends because I imagine them scrolling through their Instagrams and saying ‘Oh, it’s Logan again,’ over and over,” he said.

While he makes music as a personal form of therapy and self-expression, he still values the affirmation he feels when other people connect with his music. “There’s also the other side of it when people will come up to me and be like ‘Oh my God, I really liked your song,’ or ‘Oh, you’re that guy who makes music.’” he said. “That makes all of the outreach worth it.”