Whether you have caught a secret admirer’s eye while walking to lunch at Ludwig, complained to your mother about your 8 a.m. class, or made Dr. Bowling into a meme, odds are you have made it onto the many social media accounts underneath Olivet’s bubble.
As a mid-sized private Christian liberal arts college, a variety of Olivet-themed social media accounts have been created as outlets for entertainment and expression, both fun and provocative.
A frequent joke among Olivet students and faculty revolves around the school’s oftentimes insular environment. This environment, known as “the bubble,” oftentimes helps foster great student relationships. At other times, though, it is poking fun at the school’s (and its inhabitants) lack of real-world exposure.
In order to understand some of the dynamics at play, it can be helpful to look at student social media accounts. These accounts reflect and interact with the bubble in many ways, allowing us to see a broader snapshot of student life. They don’t hold to Olivet’s rules or guidelines, so the general school culture is the ultimate guiding force behind them.
ONU Secret Admirers
ONU Secret Admirers is one of the most active and entertaining accounts surrounding the Olivet bubble that has continued to gain students’ attention over the past three years. Since its creation in 2018, students have maintained a fascination with proclaiming their love to their Olivet peers through an anonymous Facebook page. The admins of this page claim they are keeping ONU’s anonymous love alive by posting this school’s forbidden crushes to the internet, and the students agree. Everyday, a new post is made name dropping Olivet’s new eye catching bachelor or bachelorette. This account even hosts blind dates by asking the students to fill out a questionnaire while the admins play match-maker.
Giving Olivet students the ability to rant about their campus crushes fuels this already love crazed campus. With students getting married by junior year, classes chanting “Ring by Spring,” and ONU Secret Admirers, no one can claim that love is dead on Olivet’s campus.
Olivet Memes
The meme page “Olivet Memes” (@olivetmemes) on Instagram is by far one of the most provocative ONU pages. It oftentimes features posts heavily critiquing Olivet and its policies. It serves as a place for fellow students to revel in some oftentimes universal disdains. Although it might just seem like another one-off meme page, the page owners would beg to differ. To them and many others, the page acts as the antithesis of official ONU pages. To them the page is reality, opposed to the cleanly exterior portrayed by the school.
“We believe that having an account that provides free speech and true student perception of the campus is important to showcase” says the admin of the page. “People don’t want to see the censored fake posts about ‘life on campus,’ they want to see the real thing.”
It isn’t dedicated to slandering the school, though. They care more about the student body than they do proving a point. “It brings comedy and laughs to the campus and pokes at some of the best and worst aspects of the school,” according to ONU Memes. To them it seems, it is healthy to point out the bad while still being able to enjoy the more agreeable aspects of life at ONU.
The school takes their jokes lightly. When ONU Memes takes the jokes too far, they will get requests from Olivet to take them down. They always comply, as they say the school has been “able to take the jokes on our page pretty well”.
ONU Confessions
In ONU Confessions (now called ONU Confessions 2.0), people can send messages anonymously to the page and have the creator of the page post it. The creator of the page tends to stay away from challenging topics and focuses more on creating a safe space where students can get relatable thoughts off their chest. If something seems too good to be true or is outright false, the creator will notify that the post is either under review or is simply false. The creator of the page tries to get everyone’s messages on the site as they can however, the creator is usually inactive at times and will get flooded with messages that they would rather not post.
In the past, this account has caused alarm because of confessions from the students that the admins have interpreted as harmful. One of the anonymous admins claims that they created the account to give students a outlet to express thoughts without being judged. According to a 2017 research study in Computers in Human Behavior, social media increases college students bonding and communication with their social atmosphere, promoting this admins vision for this account. Overall, ONU Confessions is about posting what is going on in the ONU community and how students can share their secrets, ask for advice anonymously, and express freely.
“I wanted the page to just be a stress reliever, create some comedy, and just be a safe space.”
aNONYMOUS onu CONFESSIONS aDMIN
ONU Moms
ONU Moms is a private Facebook group dedicated for moms of Olivet students to commune with one another. This group was created in 2015 and is managed by mom, Sherry Sherwood. Members of the group range from current, past, and future ONU moms. Many of the posts are concerned parents asking for prayer or advice for their student. Sherwood does her best to keep this page strictly available for only Olivet moms, meaning students and non-ONU moms will most likely not be admitted into the private group.
Whether it’s asking for prayers for nervous freshman or seeking out top rated auto-shops for broken down student cars, ONU Moms has a wide variety of content. Every so often page admin, Sherwood, will pop in to remind the moms of the page’s purpose: “This space has been created for us to encourage each other, share Scripture, pray for each other, give advice, laugh at how pitiful we are, and just connect to other moms who know exactly how we are feeling.”
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