More work and less play is often associated with Sternies, but that might be due to the lack of opportunities for them to show their lighter side. As a result, Stern junior Elijah Millen is creating a film composed entirely of videos from Stern students’ submissions to highlight daily life in the business school.

As the social media director of the Stern Undergraduate College Street Team — a group of Stern’s ambassadors for prospective students — Millen launched the contest as the team’s major social media campaign of the year. He hopes to bring an authentic view of Stern to prospective students.

“What I really want to show is a student’s perspective of what four years of being in Stern is going to be like,” Millen said. “It’s really a big trend right now to show people a true look of life, like many brands, such as Starbucks, have done. A lot of times, it’s missing when people try to advertise for school.”

Millen’s idea for the video is to outsource the content to the rest of the students in Stern and collaborate to creatively show the range of activities business students do on an average day.

“It would be really cool to utilize the technology we have today,” Millen said. “People can just take out their phone and send us a clip right from there. There are no restrictions to what content they could submit.”

Although there has been little participation, Millen and his team recognize that promotion will need to be better planned for future years to come.

“It’s a promotion thing that comes with any contest,” Millen said. “And in order to get people really excited about that, it needs to be a much longer thing. That’s a learning lesson for us.”

Through this year’s experience, the team plans to launch a similar video contest next semester for the International Studies Program, in which Stern juniors pursuing a business degree will travel overseas together during Spring Break to study foreign business.

While Stern has long suffered from the stereotype that it’s all about making money and has nothing to do with creativity, Millen considers this initiative a good opportunity to show that Stern students have more skills than just finance.

“There are a lot of people like me in Stern that have more interests than accounting,” Millen said. “It’s just we don’t have many avenues to express that.”
Email Lingyi Hou at [email protected].