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.”
Reach members at USC, collaborating on content.
Brianna Seaberg
