At a time when Instagrammers are earning over £6,000 per post and YouTube celebs rake in up to £11 million a year, it’s no wonder that now you can get a formal education to become a Social media sensation.
About the one-of-a-kind study programme
Yiwu Industrial and Commercial College (YWICC) in China is offering a degree that'll help you become an Internet celebrity.Located near Shanghai, the college offers a degree in "Modelling and Etiquette." The hands-on course teaches students everything required to become a “wang hong”, i.e.; a social media celeb.
Classes include catwalk practice, dance performance, make-up modelling, public relations etiquette, lens expression, merchandise display, and much more. Internet celebrities in China celebrities in China can earn up to £35 million, annually. According to Analysys International, a Chinese internet consultancy firm, China's wang hong industry was worth £7 billion in 2016 and could double by 2018.
There are more than 700 million smartphone users in China.
Other unconventional college degrees around the world
The University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia offers a degree in ‘Wasting Time on the Internet’. The students are required to interact “exclusively through chat rooms and listservs, or over social media.”
"We’re Reading And Writing more than we have in a generation, but we are reading and writing differently — skimming, parsing, grazing, bookmarking, forwarding, retweeting, reblogging, and spamming language — in ways that aren’t yet recognized as literary," explained Professor Kenneth Goldsmith, who teaches the course, in a November 2014 a New Yorker article.
What’s more, Pitzer College in California has a course called ‘Learning from YouTube.’ The one-of–kind course aims to explore what the video-sharing site can teach everyone. “Each section is an opportunity to explore different dimensions of already existing media theory and how it might help us to interpret the seemingly random and excessive experience of navigating through the YouTube universe, from LolCats to Jasmine Revolution uploads,” noted Faye Ginsburg, Director of Center for Media Culture and History at the New York University in an MIT Press article.
If you’re a Potterhead, you can do a course called ‘To Hogwarts, Harry: An Intensive Study of Harry Potter Through the British Isles’ at the Central Michigan University in Michigan, U.S. The students are required to read the J.K. Rowling series and visit historical places that were an inspiration behind the locations described in the "Harry Potter" saga, such as Edinburgh Castle, Bodleian Library and Christ's Church at Oxford University, etc.
For those who are interested in chatting with Legolas and Thranduil, University of Wisconsin offers a course in Sindarin or the Elvish, one of the many languages spoken in J.R.R Tolkien’s "Lord of the Rings."
Meanwhile, Santa Clara University of California offers a course in ‘The Physics of Star Trek.’ The course uses the sci-fi TV series to discuss "Newton's and Einstein's physics, the Standard Model of particle physics, and the physics that underlies inertial dampers, transporter beams, warp drive, and time travel", according to TIME.
For those who are more inclined towards philosophy, there’s a course called ‘The Meaning of Life’ taught at Brown University, U.S. “There may be no single question more important than this: What is the meaning of life? It’s a question we all face, and finding an answer is urgent,” states the university website.
And you thought studying was boring!
