Obituary: Campus Story

On a sticky September night, we sit in our dorm room swiping through the glittery new Snapchat filters. We apply the filters, which transform our grinning visages: our appearances morph into sagging old faces, our mouths vomit rainbows, and our eyes bulge out of our heads. Though the pictures we take are frivolous, we cannot shake a lingering feeling of dread. Something is rotten in the state of Snapchat, as William Shakespeare once proclaimed.

We dismiss this unsettling feeling and return to the task at hand: Making hearts pop out of our eyes. “Maybe this will be the picture that finally lands us on Campus Story,” we think to myself. What can we say? We’ve always dreamed big. We cross our fingers that our googly-eyed faces will be featured in the Harvard-wide virtual slideshow.

We click the arrow in the bottom right-hand corner, and that’s when it hits us. That’s when the room starts to spin. Campus Story is gone. It is a moment like this that puts your priorities in perspective. Somewhere deep down, we had always known that Campus Story came first, family came second, and everything else came after that. But we never truly realized what we had until it was gone, vanished from our list of options on Snapchat.

Sure, we still have geotags that mark the location of pictures taken in the Quad, by the river, or in Annenberg. But how will we know when a peer is leaving Lamont at 1:29 in the morning? How will we know when an athlete is working out at Harvard Stadium? How will we know when some unlucky kid is having swai for dinner?

We ask Amy Y. Zhang ’18, a now-faded Campus Story celebrity, about her days of glory as one of Campus Story’s favorite late-night Lamont-leavers. “The thought was obviously on my mind: If I stay another hour, I could just, like, film myself leaving at like 4:20,” Zhang reminisces.

Garrett C. Allen ’16 earned his fame in a different way. “I really just had my own Snapchat persona that was like an extension of myself as a person but also like very much was a person that’s not me all the time,” Allen says. “Then I started going on a motivational route and being all encouraging and telling people to smile and be nice to people, singing nice songs.”

But in the wake of Campus Story’s disappearance, Allen has little use for his cheeriness. “A part of me has been lost and won’t ever come back,” he laments. “Hashtag bring back Campus Story.”

What was the appeal of this silly little thingamajig? Why did we all tune in day after day? In its short time in Cambridge, Campus Story became more to Harvard than just a device for tracking the goings-on of Lamont studiers and lively motivators. Campus Story was bigger than any one of us. It was bigger than even the Story God, that forever mysterious deity who chose which faces would grace our screens. It brought us together in struggle and in triumph. It made us a community.

Or maybe it didn’t. We don’t really know. We’ll go back to vomiting rainbows on Snapchat now.