A Day In The Life...on TikTok
When Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington’s Social Media team was looking for a lecturer to share their life on TikTok, Wellington School of Business and Government’s Erin Roxburgh chose the right music, practiced her voice-overs and worked on her angles.
A lecturer in the School of Management, Erin Roxburgh is always looking for new ways to engage her students. Last year she created a podcast that gave her students a peek behind the scenes of various sporting lives and management styles (MGMT319).
This year’s trick is to let students see behind the curtain when it comes to their lecturer’s busy, and sometimes mundane, life. Erin was already familiar with TikTok but had not thought about using it to directly reach her students, until an opportunity presented itself.
“The Social Media team asked me to make a Day in The Life video [a popular trend on the TikTok platform] and it gained something like 30,000 views. I had a TikTok account already, but this gave me the idea to keep going, and to talk about my life as a lecturer. It doesn’t have to be interesting all the time. People are inherently nosy.”
Erin likes the “sense of anonymity” with using TikTok. It’s her face and her voice out there for display, but crucially, “you have a bit more control [than with other social media platforms], it is a smarter algorithm”.
This means when Erin talks about her various meetings, and everyday stresses, she is able to humanise her role as a lecturer and academic. She includes numerous coffees, gym workouts, lunch and dinner dates, lesson planning, and some of the more standard TikTok trends, such as ‘Fit Checks’ (outfit trials, before leaving the house).
With only some slight hesitation around what her colleagues might think, Erin decided to dive right in, it very quickly became less about who would see it and far more about the direct reach to students.
“I have messages from students on TikTok saying they like the videos, that I romanticise lecturing, in a nice way. Any high performing and competitive job can be scary, even if you’re competent. We don’t often allow people to humanise us, and this is a way to do that.”
Erin wants to encourage more questions and conversation through the TikTok medium. She is passionate about removing barriers, and says: “If people can see why you might want to be a lecturer, they can see what it looks like, and can ask you questions. I want to be able to open that up even more, get people asking questions around grades, and the journey through study to work.
“I haven’t followed the most conventional path into academia, I had to re-do accounting. I did not have the very best undergraduate grades, and maybe there are others out there inspired by that.”
Erin acknowledges that TikTok is not for everyone, and says that you really do have to lean into your own personality.
“It did take me out of my comfort zone at first, but it has been worth it. People will mention at the end of a lecture that they really like my TikTok, and that’s super cool, a new way into a further conversation, a way of connecting outside of the class.”
She does not film her classes or her students, and understands that there are rules of engagement to the process. Erin is buoyed by the community that is building on her page.
She uses CapCut, a simple editing software app, to edit the videos at night, and says it does not take very long. TikTok is about presenting a slightly staged version of authenticity— anything too polished is immediately detected by users.
For Erin Roxburgh, as with her podcast, TikTok is just another way of engaging with students and finding new ways to communicate. It’s a chance to connect in a world that can seem detached and fragmented.
“It doesn’t even have to be that interesting”, she says with a laugh. “People get hooked on the silliest things. And there’s nothing wrong with that, ultimately I want to show people the person behind the teacher standing at the front of the class.”
You can follow Erin on TikTok and view her videos here.