The Meme Craze Hits Northwestern

As if Northwestern students did not have enough distractions already, Northwestern Memes is here and procrastination has never been so hilarious.

Northwestern Memes is the Wildcat edition of a recent trend. Colleges all over the country, like University of Wisconsin- Madison, are creating insanely popular Facebook pages featuring campus specific memes (a cultural phenomenon spread over the Internet, the most popular being images combined with humorous text). 

Freshman Grace Buckingham stumbled across the popular Northwestern page after looking at other college- themed memes.  “My sister goes to Dartmouth and she sent me link to the Dartmouth memes page,” said Buckingham. “I looked it up to see if NU had one and I found the Northwestern Memes page.  It totally makes my Facebook procrastination worse.”

The Northwestern Memes Facebook page was created by Sam Helmy and Santiago Nielsen on February 7^th and basically exploded over night.  The page received over a thousand “Likes” less than 12 hours after its creation. The page features memes made by anyone who wants to give it a shot on memegenerator.com.  The page owners control spam and offensive material, but otherwise students are free to be creative.

Meme creators have adapted classic memes like Philosoraptor, Hipster Cat, and Socially Awkward Penguin for Northwestern.   Memes consistently poke fun at Northwestern topics like impossible midterms, Northwestern’s sports apathy, and the general inability of CAESAR and Blackboard to be real, functioning websites. Letting anyone post memes has led to some annoyingly bad first attempts, but also to some NU –themed comedy gold. The memes pictured are extremely popular ones with high numbers of “Likes.”

The page currently has more than 3,000 “Likes” and new memes are consistently being posted.  With the stress of registering for spring quarter classes and finals quickly approaching, I can already see a new batch of memes popping up. I can also see myself scrolling through the page for hours when I should be studying.

The success of the Northwestern Memes page comes from the fact that it brings Wildcats together.  A joke about how much it sucks to live in Shepard is just infinitely funnier when people agree with you. Making a successful Northwestern Meme is all about validation. You feel like a comedy genius for saying what everyone is thinking, Tech is a labyrinth and yes, it is awkward to greet others on Sheridan Road.