Who Tells the St Andrews Story? The online worlds of student influencers

Whether walking through town, sitting on the beach, or simply sitting in the library, you are bound to hear a multitude of accents and backstories. Now, you can also hear many of those backstories online as influencing becomes an increasingly popular hobby for students. Only a small slice of the university experience, however, seems to end up on the internet: the familiar story of the international student in St Andrews. If you search for the University on TikTok or YouTube, plenty of videos appear, but one trend is consistent: many creators are American. Nearly one in five students at the University are American, but online it seems even more are. 

Isla Freshwater, a first-year psychology and management student from Connecticut,  has over twenty thousand followers on TikTok (@isless). She first amassed many of these followers while posting content in high school, but her videos now focus on St Andrews and student life. 

“If a student was coming to the school, they could definitely look at my page to see what their experience was going to be like,” Freshwater said. “However, I haven’t touched on the hard parts of university and being a student as a whole.” 

Freshwater has been making content since she was ten years old by editing videos and clips of her day. At fourteen, she started her current account. She began to gain followers when she started making videos giving viewers advice, a content style that she said she would love to start doing again. 

“I get DMs and comments all the time asking for advice on different issues in different girls’ lives, and I truly love helping,” Freshwater said. “I’d love to have my account be a combination of a positive space and a digital diary as I keep documenting my St Andrews journey.” 

Freshwater isn’t the only one. Emma Rose Elizabeth, a first-year from Texas studying neuroscience,is behind the Instagram account @stoxbridge.girl. She posts daily reels and stories about her life, offering her followers a look into her classes, gym sessions, nights out, and more.

“Half the time I post on a whim without overthinking it. I keep it authentic because I’m not trying to grow an audience,” Elizabeth said. “I don’t really care if I have one follower or 1,000. It’s a way to discover myself.” 

One of Elizabeth’s most recent posts shows her experience during Raisin Weekend, which involves Freshers getting woken early on Sunday to play games  before participating in the traditional Monday foam fight. Elizabeth smiles in photos alongside her academic siblings and father, giving viewers a glimpse into her Raisin experience. 

“When people recognize me in town or send me DMs saying I inspire them to try something new or just that I make them laugh, it really makes my day,” Elizabeth said. According to Elizabeth, in the last 30 days, the account has hit over 148k views. 

American influencers aren’t alone in creating content about the town. Liz Moreno Kristofits is a second-year student from Spain studying  five-year chemistry programme, and the owner of an  Instagram account called @sciencegirldiaries. Almost all of her content is tailored to being a science student, which she believes “is a good way to showcase [opportunities] to other people.”

Her content isn’t just about life in St Andrews. This past summer, Kristofits interned at the chemical company Croda, where she posted weekly videos about her experience and the lessons she learned. While some of her content is more tailored to young people in Spain who may want to study STEM or go abroad for university, Kristofits is trying to grow her audience and make her content accessible to everyone. 

“I used to do a little series within my content called ‘All Things St Andrews,’ and it’s kind of a talking video; I’ve done a few [about] why St Andrews is good for the STEM girls or like a day in the life,” Kristofits explained . 

The current St Andrews influencers aren’t the first. McKenna Steinbeck, who graduated last year, began posting YouTube vlogs about her time at St Andrews at the start of her first year and has now amassed over 100k subscribers. 

Recently, Steinbeck sat down with BBC Scotland and reacted to their new documentary about Freshers’ Week at the University. Her caption reads, “Absolutely loved the first episode.” Throughout the video, she comments on the connections between the BBC documentary and her experience at St Andrews in a format similar to her YouTube videos, which may chronicle a weekend in her life or a trip with other students.

Rebecca Tozer (@beakyton) posts the ‘StAnswers’ series on TikTok, where she responds to questions about St Andrews and offers a student’s perspective. Her first StAnswers video was in January, and the series has only grown since then. 

Toxer also has a YouTube channel that is less frequently updated but features longer videos going in-depth on topics not necessarily related to St Andrews. 

Not all the influencer’s opinions are positive, though. The recent BBC documentary and press surrounding St Andrews have affected a lot of this discourse. In September, Sophie Rose Jenkins, a former student, spoke out about her experience facing classism at the University, claiming students and staff made comments about her accent and that she faced a lack of disability support. In response, former students Victoria Priestner and Zahra Agueye both made TikToks about their experience, highlighting their positions on the ‘St Andrews hate train.’  While she was a student, Agueye’s TikToks centered around her experience participating in societies and daily student life, highlighting her experience and now showing her life post-grad. Priestner, on the other hand, hasn’t produced much content post-grad. Priestner’s recent video reads “won’t be engaging with the St Andrews hate train bc I’ve lowkey been hating on it for 4 years,” while Agueye’s reads “I cannot engage with any of the St Andrews uni hate cause it’ll be quiet on the creek when I start talking about the POC experience…”  These former students provide a different perspective on the student experience at St Andrews, countering the overwhelmingly positive content online about the University and town.  

While the number of people posting their daily life online may seem staggering for a town with just three streets, these influencers think that providing viewers with multiple viewpoints into student life is valuable.

“It’s such a unique way to connect with others,” Freshwater said. “We’re so lucky to have this modern technology available to us, so I feel like we might as well utilise it where we can.” 

Illustration by Eleanor Vielhaber