“Live for the nights I’ll never remember with the people I won’t forget,” Drake, popular R&B and hip-hop artist, said. But what he did not convey was that the next time you are partying, on or off campus, your drunken moments could make you Twitter famous, even if it’s only for a week.
A year ago, the Twitter page SUNYPartyStories (@SUNYPartyStory) was created and now boasts over 65,000 followers who vote every week on 20 photos. A photo wins by having the most cumulative likes and retweets, giving their school bragging rights for hosting the week’s most outrageous party until the next Sunday evening when polls open again.
The creators behind SUNYPartyStories, who would like to remain anonymous because of the page’s content, wanted to create a platform where “college adventures” could compete against each other, like the other mediums that are provided for sports, music, academics and politics.
“How many student’s actually participate in those?” said a representative of SUNYPartyStories. “A much larger percentages of students party.”
Scan a few of @SUNYPartyStory’s photos from previous weeks and you will find everything from keg stands, “up-chuckers,” promiscuous students, artwork, drawn in Sharpie on students faces and even “birthday suits.” But as the Twitter page gains more viewers each week, there has been an increase to see who can capture the wildest party moment on their phones.
Armin Radoncic, a sophomore majoring in health sciences, said that the page is pretty funny, but depending on what’s going on in the photo, it could be seen as really embarrassing, especially if you did not consent.
“I would either feel awesome for having a good night,” Radoncic said, “or completely regret whatever it was I was doing.”
This raises a potential problem to the page; it helps bring to light the college lifestyle and gives viewers a laugh, however, students can be shown in their most intoxicated states acting animalistic and while everything seems acceptable in the moment, once the photo is posted, there could be backlashes unbeknownst to those involved.
But SUNYPartyStories state that people have been “passing out” and “doing stupid things since the romans,” and most of the time, these pictures would have been “posted on personally pages anyway.” If there was a problem and someone wanted a photo removed, they would respect the request, just like the infamous scenario of “#TheLegendOfEntry5.”
In the beginning of this past February, a photo was submitted by an anonymous source at SUNY Cobleskill and caused uproar against the account. The photo was finally removed at the request of the submitter, but you can still find the hashtag and a few reactions on twitter.
Some of the most popular schools to appear are University of Albany, Cortland and Oneonta. Stony Brook University (SBU) is not known to get as rowdy as its sister schools and had not even been featured until two weeks ago when there were two entries in one week. We lost to Buffalo State’s photo of the “Winter Olympics” but it’s a start to compete against some of the more established SUNY party schools.
Eric Shalyutin, 19, a sophomore majoring in political science, said that the Twitter page could help SBU positively by creating more of an “authentic college experience” where the whole student community can “party together.”
At the moment, SUNYPartyStories only provides a few “chuckle-worthy” tweets to Shalyutin but because SBU is not an established school on this account, it makes him feel like there is no point to visit the account.
“The social life on campus is honestly pretty bad,” Shalyutin said. “Homecoming was probably the only day I truly felt proud to call myself a Seawolf.”
He said that because most of the students are commuters and those who dorm do not want to join Greek life, they miss out on a lot and are not able to take part in the campus community, leaving SBU with “small groups of people” who do things “their own way.”
@SUNYPartyStory adds a little different “buzz” to your Sunday night Twitter feed.
