On a warm January night at a luxury apartment complex near the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, time was running out.
More than 20 students, many of them freshmen, darted around the lush grounds. All were dressed in white. Most had never met before. They scrambled into small groups to brainstorm, their quips echoing beneath palatial arches. They filmed one another with their smartphones, directing whoever was on camera at any given moment. At last, they circled one central phone to edit and post what they’d created — branded content for the social list-sharing app Ditto — all in 20 minutes.
The stakes were high. In what resembled both a Project Runway challenge and an unusually straight-edged sorority-rush gauntlet, the students were in the final round of competing for admission to a club that could help determine the trajectory of their college experience and their professional lives beyond: USC Reach, the first and only social media organization on campus. “It was definitely nerve-racking,” Kirsten Hawkins, then a prospective member, tells me later. “It felt like it was make-or-break.”
Each semester, USC Reach receives more than 100 applications for roughly 20 to 30 open spots. The competition reflects the club’s growing influence. Founded in 2017 by a group of USC students including Markian Benhamou and Xavier Di Petta, the club has become equal parts creator incubator and networking accelerator, giving students a place to collaborate while experimenting with different content styles, niches and platforms. Just as importantly, it serves as a bridge to the industry through partnerships and workshops with companies like YouTube, Netflix, Google, Snapchat and the ByteDance-owned video-editing app CapCut to host workshops and office visits. The club also works with brands including Monster Energy, Sweetgreen and the skin care company Good Molecules, giving students opportunities to create sponsored content in exchange for swag.
Today, USC Reach is just one chapter in a much larger network. Reach Nationals, its nonprofit parent organization, has grown to more than 150 chapters at colleges and universities across 20 states — including UCLA, the University of Michigan and the University of Pennsylvania — since launching in 2023. While the organization has expanded rapidly, the founding USC chapter — at a university long known for launching careers in entertainment — remains its flagship. Its alumni include Alan Chikin Chow, whose scripted, K-drama-inspired videos have earned him more than 101 million YouTube subscribers. (Earlier in 2026, Netflix picked up a scripted series developed by Chow and Hybe America, the U.S. subsidiary of South Korea’s largest K-pop agency.) Other successful Reach alumni include 23-year-old Penn State graduate Katie Feeney, a sports and lifestyle content creator with 14 million followers across TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube, who joined ESPN in December; and Casper Opala, a Reach alum from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, who has amassed over 10 million combined followers with his personal finance content. The collective success of Reach and its alumni is a direct reflection of how established and desirable the once Wild West field of content creation has become as a career path.
That winter night in L.A., after the challenge, the USC Reach hopefuls returned to a study room in the apartment complex to explain their thought processes and reflect on what they learned before a panel of current Reach members dressed in black. (The effect was less hazing ritual, more class presentation with palpable tension.)
Afterward, the members directed the students outside. En masse, they filed across the courtyard, past a glistening aquamarine pool, and congregated by the elevator.
Those who would be invited to ride up didn’t know it yet, but on the roof, their next era would begin in earnest.
When Reach Nationals CEO Dylan Huey joined USC Reach as a freshman in 2020, he was already a content creator with over 1 million followers who set out simply to support — and collaborate with — other young creators. By 2022, he’d become the club’s president and had a vision of scaling the model, founding the national parent organization in 2023. “As an organization like us evolves, we want to really cement ourselves in the industry on a larger scale,” he says.
Huey, 24, says an increasing number of companies have sought out the organization directly as Reach has expanded. “We’ve seen more brands that have been excited about partnering with us — especially right now with back-to-school [content ahead of the fall semester],” he says. “We’re getting brands left and right reaching out to us because they know we have access to all these students all in one conglomerate.”
Huey is describing several trends unfolding at once. First, “content creator” has become one of the most desirable careers among young people; according to Edison Research, as of May 2025, just less than one-third of Americans ages 13 to 24 identify themselves as such. Accordingly, colleges and universities have become epicenters of online culture. The viral spectacle of #BamaRush on TikTok; the rise of Alix Earle while she was a student at the University of Miami, which helped usher in a new generation of creators at the school; and the explosion of athlete influencers following the NCAA’s adoption of NIL — which allows student athletes to “receive compensation from third parties for use of their name, image and likeness” — have all demonstrated the commercial and cultural value of campus life as content. (The number of college-aged creators in the U.S. is difficult to determine, as is the amount of money on the table; however, the NIL market alone is expected to reach $4.5 billion in 2027, according to sports tech company Opendorse.)
As a result, talent companies and brands have developed a particular appetite for college-aged creators. For example, in 2023, marketing and talent agency The Team (formerly Wasserman) launched Next Gen, which connects brands with Gen Alpha, Gen Z and millennial creators, including high school and college students. An ever-expanding array of brands — from Microsoft to Victoria’s Secret to Red Bull — regularly recruits student creators through ambassadorship programs and on-campus events.
This dizzying plethora of opportunities can be difficult for students themselves to navigate, logistically and financially. Take Emeline Smith, a 22-year-old lifestyle creator and model who graduated from the University of Miami in May. As a junior, Smith, then a budding creator with roughly 13,000 followers across TikTok and Instagram, was flummoxed by a sudden flood of outreaches from brands. “I didn’t really know what was valid and how much I should be charging, and that was really confusing for me,” she says. “I was able to figure it out a little bit with the help of people talking about it on social media, but I did notice that there was a gap in information given to college students.”
The experience in part inspired Smith to get in on the ground floor of the Campus Creator Club, which was founded in 2025 by fellow UMiami students Noah Gaudet and Thomas Van Der Leegte; the club began as a GroupMe group in partnership with Day 1 Marketing, an agency also founded by the duo that specializes in campus-based creator and influencer marketing. In contrast to Reach’s IRL strategy, the CCC functions primarily as an online community that connects members with paid and gifted brand collaborations, offers content feedback and hosts Zoom sessions with prominent creators. Since launching, it has grown rapidly, from an initial 50 creators to more than 1,000 members within months; by February, the group hit 10,000 members. It now includes students from all over the country and has transitioned from its GroupMe roots into a mobile app.
Smith, who graduated in May, is overseeing the Campus Creator Club’s expansion to colleges nationwide. “One of the biggest struggles that college content creators have is the legality of everything,” she says. “You’re signing a lot of contracts. A lot of people are getting these big brand deals, but they don’t have management. So unless you’re very knowledgeable about how to read the fine print or have a legal adviser helping you, it can be pretty dangerous. Our goal right now is to be able to help [college creators] get safe brand deals and be protected — and be paid for their time and their energy.”
Colleges and universities themselves are increasingly trying to capitalize on the creator economy, too. A growing number of universities — including Duke, Cornell and, of course, USC — offer courses centered on content creation. Last year, UMiami launched a minor in Strategic Social Media Communication that is “designed to give students a competitive edge in one of communication’s fastest-growing sectors.” This fall, Syracuse will debut its own content-creation minor — the first academic offering from its Center for the Creator Economy. Meanwhile, the University of Texas at San Antonio debuted its Digital Media Influence major in 2024, which is designed for those who are “chronically online and passionate about digital content creation” and advertises itself as equipping students with the “skills and knowledge needed to turn your passion into a rewarding career.”
Chad Mahood, an associate professor of communication at UTSA and the designer of the program, says it is the first dedicated major catering to aspiring content creators in the U.S. But instead of delving into the ever-evolving landscape of social media platforms and how to navigate them, the curriculum focuses on equipping students with the critical-thinking skills required to identify a target audience, create tailored content, test its effectiveness and use data to refine strategy. (The curriculum also includes a study of media psychology and propaganda.) “Where our degree is really unique is we’re focusing on the brain part of it and analyzing your audience, understanding it from point of view — the stuff that AI can’t do for you,” Mahood says. “AI can help you make something better, but not if you don’t understand who your audience is. You have to first understand that.”
According to Mahood, the program has grown rapidly, from zero students in fall 2024 to 58 by spring 2025 and 145 this year. (Mahood says this most recent number is roughly equivalent to the enrollment of UTSA’s entire modern languages department.)
I ask Mahood how he and his colleagues grapple with the evolving nature of the creator economy and the ever-changing algorithms that power it. “Whether it’s shorter-form or longer-form videos, whether something with music or without music — all of that’s constantly changing in the tastes and the zeitgeist of the culture,” Mahood says. “But what hasn’t changed, from the invention of radio until right now, is how a person with a platform engages with their audience and how they speak to their audience … so as long as you can focus what your message is and how your message is going to resonate with your audience, the AI tech, in terms of the algorithm, is not going to be quite as important.”
Huey, Reach Nationals’ CEO, sees this a different way, arguing that while schools can teach the fundamentals and the business of the creator economy, it can be more difficult for them to keep up with how quickly the landscape is changing. Also, he adds, “every single creator has a different niche, so the one-size-fits-all package is a little bit hard.”
Put another way: “You can teach about influencer strategies … but it’s hard to teach someone how to be viral,” Huey says. “There’s no textbook that can do that.”
USC Reach’s current members may not yet have struck gold like some of their famous predecessors — in an increasingly crowded landscape, success like Chow’s or Feeney’s is harder and harder to come by — but they are prime examples of the various ways young people can level up from social media-savvy coed to bona fide creator.
For example: Chloe Sorensen, a rising junior and a member of the university’s varsity rowing team, joined the club this year with Pinterest as her primary platform. Over the next year, she plans to shift to shortform TikTok videos educating female college rowers like herself on how to navigate the recruiting process or the transfer portal. (Sorensen transferred to USC after one year at Harvard.) Navya Sharma, a Reach board member and a rising senior, creates content centering on her personal journey as an international student from India who is also pursuing acting and filmmaking. Kirsten Hawkins, whom I met as a prospective new member, is a lifestyle creator on TikTok and Instagram who has secured organic partnerships with major companies like Microsoft. And Ziyu Gao, the club’s vp, posts TikToks about the process of getting into USC; a 2025 clip, which shows her real-time reactions to her college admissions decisions, has amassed nearly half a million views.
There is also Jackie Michelle, USC Reach’s outgoing president, who graduated in May. On Instagram and TikTok, Michelle blends day-in-the-life and GRWM (“Get Ready With Me”) content, L.A. restaurant recommendations and niche passion projects, like documenting her hunt for Jellycat collectibles around the city. (Eventually, she says, the brand slid into her DMs and began inviting her to events.) As she embarks on a career in psychology, she has begun diversifying her output for her new era, including a daily TikTok account of her impressions of postgrad life.
I ask her what advice she’d give to the Reach members she’s leaving behind. “Just keep posting,” she says. “Even though you feel like everyone might be judging you for posting something, at the end of the day, no one really cares. You should do it because you love it.”
And at USC Reach, everyone does. Every creator I spoke to brimmed with enthusiasm for their chosen vocation. “The bond between everybody in the group has just grown increasingly, and it’s beautiful,” says Sharma. “It’s the sense of shared purpose and also hanging out literally every day, all the time; the best thing about it is you’re working together while also having fun together.”
But that winter night in Los Angeles, at least, there was tension in the air. I’d made it to the roof ahead of the new members. As groups started to arrive, a sea of current Reach members awaited them, whooping and clapping as soon as the elevator door opened. Then it clicked: Anyone who’d made it to the roof was officially in.
The students’ faces cycled through shock, relief and finally jubilation. Then the celebration began. They mingled, talking about content, their majors and their ambitions. They grabbed pizza, cake and candy — no alcohol was served — and almost immediately began photographing and filming one another, posing with a giant “REACH” corkboard covered in Polaroids. At one point, the new members crowded along the railing, throwing up peace signs, thumbs-ups and heart hands. “I LOVE REACH,” they screamed as phone cameras flashed. The downtown skyline glowed behind them and the City of Angels — the entertainment capital of the world — beckoned below.
This story appeared in the July 22 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.
Source: Hollywood Reporter — This article was automatically imported from the source. Read full article at original source →
