AdvertisementSKIP ADVERTISEMENTYou have a preview view of this article while we are checking your access. When we have confirmed access, the full article content will load.Football players aren’t the only college students who have learned to sell their images for profit.
At several universities, students can now major in content creation. In a recent survey, nearly four in 10 Gen Z respondents said they would take a million social media followers over a steady 9-to-5 job.For a story in The Times today, I profiled someone who’s working on it.
Meet Haley DeKreek, a 20-year-old junior at the University of Arizona. With more than 45,000 TikTok followers, a gift for self-deprecating humor, a talent manager in Los Angeles and several paid brand deals (the biggest so far worth $3,000), DeKreek says she can now pay for all her shopping, food, vacations and beauty services just by doing what she has loved since kindergarten, when she played with her mom’s makeup and recorded videos of herself making slime.A life onlineDeKreek lives in the Alpha Phi sorority house, a Spanish-colonial-style mansion just off campus in Tucson that is decorated in pale pink velvets and artful stacks of coffee table books about fashion. (Kourtney Kardashian, Arizona class of 2002, was also in Alpha Phi.)Just off the foyer, a mailroom overflows with packages.
There are boxes with yoga sets and dresses for formals, boxes of makeup, hair products and skin care. Many of them are destined to appear in the “Get Ready With Me” videos DeKreek regularly posts.
And a lot of them are freebies from brands that have spotted her potential as a budding influencer, a one-girl campus marketing powerhouse.DeKreek doesn’t formally study content creation in college, but her major, retail and consumer science, is entirely online; she never attends class in person.I met DeKreek last month in the days before Arizona’s homecoming football game against Iowa State. It was a big week: Alumni had returned to campus, and fraternities and sororities threw events almost every night in the run-up to game day.
She had a lot to do, beauty- and workwise, and I followed her around as she prepared.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?
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