Princeton University Memes for Preppy AF Teens
Princeton University Memes for Preppy AF Teens
Princeton University for Preppy AF Teens is a campus meme Facebook group for Princeton University student s founded by Nina Osipova. [1]
History
Photo of Princeton University for Preppy AF Teens founder Nina Osipova
On February 28, 2017 Nina Osipova founded the Princeton University for Preppy AF Teens campus meme group. Her idea to create the page came after talking to a friend who attends Harvard University about the Harvard Memes for Elitist 1% Tweens page. “My friend said that one of the people she knew at Harvard who is also a freshman recently started their own meme page a month ago.... She asked me, ‘Does Princeton have a meme page?’” After the conversation with her friend, Osipova looked to see if a Princeton memes page already existed. She found one page, but it was not active. “I found that there was one [page] called Princeton Memes for Sad AF Teens,” Osipova said. The Facebook page had been created in December 2016, but it had been inactive for a long time. “It was pretty much dead,” Osipova said. “No one had posted in it for quite a while.”
Osipova reached out to Shannon Chen, who had originally created the page, to see if she was interested in helping revive it.
“I messaged her.
I knew that I was going to sound super weird,” Osipova said.
Chen quickly accepted Osipova’s offer to help revive the group.
She is now one of the four co-administrators of Princeton Memes for Preppy AF Teens.
Osipova said that only University students were allowed to join the old group, which may have contributed to its lack of popularity.“The problem was that you couldn’t join the group because you could only join if you had a Princeton email,” Osipova explained.
“I thought that was super unnecessary and I told Shannon, ‘Okay, I’m going to make a new page.’”
Inexperienced in such social media ventures, Osipova said she simply followed the advice of her friend from Harvard.“My Harvard friend had told me — ‘Make sure you make everything completely public, don’t require anything from anybody, just add all of your friends, and post like five starter memes.’”Osipova received her first 20 notifications during her physics lab. After that, “everything just became totally crazy,” she noted.
The group’s popularity was exponential. Osipova said that through the Facebook page, students can post, tag friends, and comment on relatable University-specific problems and experiences through memes. Some of the memes target academic aspects of the University including writing seminars, theses, precepts, and classes, particularly COS 126: Computer Science- An Interdisciplinary Approach. Other posts focus on aspects of social life unique to the University.
Famous Posters
Martin Shkreli, the controversial former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals was a member of the group. However Osipova said that one of the admins of the page had to remove him from the group after he made “an inappropriate post.”
Fiona Erskine-Smith, a 44-year-old woman from Australia, developed a devoted following with her supportive comments on the page, especially during midterms.
Student comments called for “a GoFundMe to fly her here during Reunions” and created a “Queen Fiona of House Erskine-Smith” meme based on a scene from Game of Thrones.
Press
The Princeton University for Preppy AF Teens group has received in press in multiple publications including Mic (media company) [1], The Tab, The Daily Princetonian, and Princeton Alumni Weekly.
The Tab article praised the school's meme group writing:
Princeton kids are on the honor code – reposts will typically have captions indicating what group it’s being reposted from, all in an effort to keep things honest.
Unfortunately, they don’t always receive this same open and honest treatment back, resulting in multiple complaints from Princeton students about the alleged meme thieves, Make Cornell Meme Again and Columbia Buy/Sell Memes.
Princeton memes tend to be clever, wholesome, and in general devoid of pettiness.