It’s midnight and half of Lexington High School’s student population is probably still awake. Inevitably, most of my peers and I are up late working on assignments and cramming for tests and projects that have overloaded our already busy schedules. We are lonely, tired, and stressed. At this hour, the only company we will find are study influencers on social media who can motivate students to keep going at this late hour. Some people will be mindlessly scrolling through “study with me clips” on social media, while others are procrastinating by doing “work” through watching study hacks/tutorials. Study content exists in a complete spectrum, ranging from three-hour, non-stop studying sessions, to influencers promoting unrealistic studying habits. 

I, like many other people, fell into the rabbit hole of exploring this genre of content. For me, it was watching a lot of college decision videos. I remember specifically in seventh grade, I logged on daily for multiple hours to watch people get accepted into their dream schools. I would dig deeper to understand a “blueprint” of how to get into all of the Ivy’s; spending multiple hours researching on YouTube about specific extracurriculars or pathways for success into top schools. Instead of being productive, I replaced the time I had for developing myself with this irrelevant obsession with other people’s pathways or strategies to be their best. 

This habit carried over into high school. Now, in place of college decision videos, I put on studying vlogs as a background to my academic suffering–which somehow decreases the stress, since you know there is somebody else out there going through the same thing. I rather like these study vlogs, but some content creators can set unrealistic expectations for students. 

Especially for students at LHS, where academic competition is overly glorified, increasing academic expectations through consuming this type of content can worsen that sort of intrinsic stress. 

Despite that, there are a lot of positive influences from the studying side of social media. When we are stressed out before a test, struggling with a concept that we didn’t quite understand but brushed off instead, or dealing with a particularly difficult teacher who doesn’t teach in a way that our brains understand, certain influencers or content creators are of great help. 

I have been saved by online tutors who teach subjects and reinforce knowledge introduced in school better than many teachers can. Coming into LHS from middle school is a big change. Classes are harder, and we actually have to do homework. The transition period is both awkward and anxiety-inducing. To help me get through it, I would watch quick videos before certain classes to “pre-learn” the subject, which came in handy when some topics were glossed over in class. “The Organic Chemistry Tutor,” “Amoeba Sisters,” etc. have all been life-savers in their respective fields.

“Studying” content-creation has been a bilateral issue–while some influencers aid in our academic journeys, others hinder it by offering misinformed and unrealistic standards.