Scrolling with Jena Kim ’27

Jena Kim ’27 learned she was a bit famous on a morning last April, as she and a friend walked by Neilson Library. “I was in my sweats and this bright orange shirt,” Kim says. “It was laundry day.”

That’s when a prospective student—the lanyard was the clue—approached with a question: “Are you Jenda?”

This was a reference to jendasom, Kim’s username on TikTok and Instagram. It’s a mashup of her first and middle names.

Once she got over being speechless, Kim confirmed that she is indeed the social media content creator known for her posts about life at Smith.

“I love your videos,” the high schooler said.

She’s not the only one.

Kim has 71,000 followers on TikTok and 16,000 on Instagram, putting her solidly in the category of “micro-influencer,” a marketing term for the rare social media user who has between 10,000 and 100,000 followers. For context, the Pew Research Center reports that 36 is the median follower count among U.S. adult TikTok users.

How did Kim become a person who’s recognized by strangers? “A big misconception is that social media popularity happens overnight,” she says on a Friday afternoon in the sun-filled living room of Tenney House, the co-op where she lives with 13 other students. Wearing fuzzy slippers, she takes a seat on a couch and explains how she gained her audience. “It’s a lot of trial and error,” she says. “To be a content creator, to understand the algorithm, you have to just keep posting.”

Kim grew up in Queens, New York, and started posting as a ninth grader stuck at home during the COVID lockdowns. “My goal then was just to make friends and to meet people,” she says.

She discovered Smith through the Posse Foundation, a nonprofit that partners with colleges in recruiting students with leadership potential to receive full scholarships and special faculty mentoring. Kim was drawn to Smith’s queer-friendly community, its low student-to-faculty ratio, and, especially, its open curriculum, because she wanted to explore her interests wherever they took her.

By the time she got to Smith, Kim had eased off social media, afraid of being perceived as “cringe,” she says. “Then I realized everybody’s kind of stuck in their own mind. Nobody is going to think you’re cringe. And if they do, who cares?”

Sophomore year, she began making and posting 30-second videos about college life. “My goal was to educate, and still is,” Kim says. “I’m a first-generation, low-income student. I didn’t have anyone to guide me through the college application process. I didn’t even know what financial aid was.” She aimed to answer questions for her younger self: What does a dining hall meal look like? How does housing selection work? What are the liberal arts? “I love being a resource for people,” she says. “I love being able to give my honest perspective. And with that, so many opportunities have come up.”

For example, Herrell’s Ice Cream and other Northampton businesses have partnered with Kim to promote their shops on her TikTok and Instagram. And she’s an Intuit college student brand ambassador, which means she gets paid to post about TurboTax and Credit Karma on her accounts. It’s her first big brand deal. “They flew me out to California for a student ambassador training session,” Kim says. “It was so incredible to be in a community of other student content creators. Everyone had their light setups, their tripods, and the same passions.”

Kim’s interests are broad. She’s a sociology major, landscape design minor, and community engagement and social change concentrator. She ushers at the Academy of Music downtown. She serves in student government. “I also feel really passionate toward fostering a sense of community at Smith,” she says.

Community is what brought Kim to the Josten Performing Arts Library one Friday to see local a cappella group The Wise Guys. She and some friends wanted to support Smith professors Floyd Cheung and Nicholas Howe, who are members. As The Wise Guys harmonized to Taylor Swift’s “You Need to Calm Down,” Kim recorded. Back in Tenney, she edited the video to 59 seconds and added a caption:

going to a historically women’s college means your friday night plans include going to a men’s acapella group’s performance of you need to calm down by taylor swift

Kim put the video on her TikTok—and watched it go viral. It racked up 2 million views and 1,535 comments, including:

i would pay 1000s of dollars to see them do the whole eras tour
they’re so cute I’m gonna cry
wholesome masculinity

Kim had found the intersection of the two most loyal fan bases on earth: Smithies and Swifties.

“I think I got 500 followers from that video,” she says. “You wouldn’t expect a group of men in their 50s and 60s to go viral on TikTok, especially on a college student’s account. But it connected so many people. So that’s the post I’m most proud of.”

Its success led The Wise Guys to start their own TikTok. The group now has 350 followers.

“Jena helped us to realize that people do pay attention to social media,” says Cheung, who, when not singing a cappella, is vice president for equity and inclusion and a professor of English language and literature and American studies.

Lately, Kim has grappled with whether to also post her more mundane moments. “I do use my social media to romanticize my life a lot,” she says. “I’ll eat by myself in the dining hall. I’ll take naps in the middle of the day. I could showcase that, but instead, I showcase walks in the woods and fun events. So yes, my life is fun, but also yes, I sit in my room and scroll on TikTok. I just don’t know if people want to see that.”

Long term, Kim thinks she may want to turn her influencer status into a full-time job. Whatever career she pursues, she hopes it will involve talking to new people every day. “I love to just connect with people,” she says. “I have made so many friends through my social media accounts.”

One of them is the very high schooler who recognized Kim near the library. Tensae Mekonnen ’29 is now a first-year who credits Kim’s videos with giving her honest, practical information on her future college.

“Being able to get that perspective from someone who’s also a student of color was really helpful for me,” Mekonnen says.

Now, whenever they spot each other on campus, they take time to catch up.

Emily Gold Boutilier is a writer and editor based in Amherst, Massachusetts. She profiled Senator Tammy Baldwin ’84 for the Spring 2025 Quarterly.

This story appears in the winter 2026 issue of the Smith Quarterly.