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PSU | Culture

My Guide To Being Popular

Sarah Connors Student Contributor, Pennsylvania State University
This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at PSU chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

In my recent adoption of Penn State party culture, I’ve realized one important thing: In order to party, you need to feel like a party.

Be Social

The more confidence you have in your media and yourself, the more confident you’ll be in the world. Social media is a place to not care, but to take advantage of focusing on presenting the already amazing aspects of your life.

Your media is whatever you want it to be. Confidence comes when you use media in a way that makes only you feel good. Be glamorous, be casual, shit-post, or be an activist — do it all! The more you show off who you are, the more people you’ll attract who like what they see.

Interact with those who seemingly align with you. Take advantage of everything you can, and you’ll start to realize there’s a lot to take advantage of, like mutual connections or having an eye for taking and posting a cute picture of the mundane.

Dress hot

Looking pretty never hurts. But unless you look pretty for yourself– and only yourself– this tip will be worthless.

When I say dress hot, what I really mean is get hot. How you present yourself doesn’t matter unless you harness how you feel. How you look should be a reflection of your day’s mood; the person you want to be. If you want to get hot, dressing in an outfit can let you harness a desired feeling: hot, comfy, lazy, cute, studious. Embody everything you do and feel like you. This is the first step to a simple wall of confidence, almost like having your guard up.

If you build your guard up enough, you can become completely confident and unaffected. You’ll no longer hear voices of what other people are thinking, only your own. It takes a lot of work, but practicing things like this is how you get there– and that’s an article for a later date. 

Everyone is equal opportunity

Interact with literally everyone you can. It doesn’t matter who anyone is; everyone is just a mind willing to connect over something nice and pleasant, and this is where you come in. Using conversation, you can make small talk out of anything. Here’s how you start:

Adults on the street always love to acknowledge you with a nod or hello. Professors enjoy talking with you before and after class. The other people who talk to your teacher after class also like talking. These are tips, people, pay attention. Next, you’ll be participating.

Start talking to people. Seriously. Once you talk to your teacher after class, talk to the guy who’s also there. Next class, you’ll want to talk to the person who sits next to you. Soon, you’ll be gaining class crushes, and they’ll both be awkwardly waiting around for you after class at the same time. Now you can’t wait for after class at all.

Not speaking from experience or anything by the way, but anyways, come up with something to talk to your teacher about before class. Maybe even try to find one of the Spugh Boyz next time you’re out, recognize and talk to one of them. At least that’s what I’ll be doing!

Nobody’s watching you

Nobody’s watching you, or reading too deeply into what you post, but “hey” to the fans that are.

At the end of the day, the only person who’s truly watching you is yourself. In order to be truly happy with the way you see yourself, you must see yourself through your own eyes.

That means be confident and ignore the way other people perceive you. Only trust how you perceive yourself.

Harness the clothes you wear and love how you look in the mirror. Be proud of the compliment you offered. See yourself as someone who makes people’s day better, and you’ll start to act in ways that make your own day better.

Act in ways that you love and love to see the ways you act. You’re truly the only pair of eyes watching you that matters.

Hey, it's Sarah. I'm currently a junior at Penn State working towards a degree in Philosophy. I spend most hours of my day jotting ideas, writing, thinking about what I'll write next, etc, etc. I'm super excited to get to share some of my work and can't wait to publish more.