Behind the Photos: A Look Inside the Studyblr Community

A unique combination of aestheticism and academics, the studyblr community is open to all. It motivates and inspires, encouraging students to work hard and excel.

Gold, spiraling cursive and intricate doodles fill the pages of a leather bound journal lying on a smooth, marble desk. Arranged carefully around it is a worn, highlighted paperback, steaming cup of coffee, and a gently burning candle. Intended to capture a serene and seemingly productive moment, study blogs are a new phenomenon that have gained immense popularity recently on social media. Known as ‘studyblrs’ on Tumblr and ‘studygrams’ on Instagram, these online communities unite different students of all ages and backgrounds from across the world in their shared commitment to academic success.

Emma Akam, creator of the popular study blog emmastudies.com, currently majors in digital and social media at the University of Technology in Sydney, Australia. She described studyblr as a positive and loving community. “We're all in there because we want to better ourselves. I love how everyone accepts everyone else, and I find it incredible that I have this platform to get to know other people,” she said in an e-mail interview.

Emmastudies began in October 2014. While procrastinating her way through studying for upcoming exams, a search for study tips on Tumblr led Akam to several small blogs dedicated to studying. She would come back to check these whenever she needed motivation, and after a week, she decided to create her own. Akam is best known within the studyblr community for her masterlists, compilations of advice and study tips, and for her printables of note-taking and planner templates which became so popular that she began to sell them on a separate Etsy shop. With a combined 450, 000 followers on her studyblr and studygram, Emmastudies has been featured on websites such as MSN, The Verge, Teen Vogue, and Buzzfeed.

Akam cited her biggest accomplishment as inspiring others. She is motivated by messages from followers who attribute their academic success to her blog. “Knowing that I have helped people get into college, improve their grades, and ease their daily school life is incredible,” she wrote. For Akam, running a studyblr is also the “best accountability partner” she has. Her studyblr serves as a visual diary of the work she puts into studying, and looking over it makes her proud of how far she’s come.

Study blogs have taken hold in the Stuyvesant community as well. For sophomore Tina Chen of @2chenstudies, studygrams are a way to share the work she puts into note-taking and studying. In order to excel in difficult classes such as A.P European History, Chen spends an hour rewriting her notes for the class every weekend. This allows her to review and organize the information learned, which has improved her grades. Posting rewritten notes encourages Chen to consistently improve her study habits. “In the future, you can look at [the notes] and go, ‘Oh, I can do it better next time.’ It just keeps motivating you to organize your work better,” she said.

Chen started her studygram last summer in an effort to reconnect with her middle school friend. Now, with around 360 followers, Chen takes turns posting with her friend, with whom she always confers about potential posts through Skype. Along with rewritten notes, Chen's studygram is full of colorful bullet journal pages. They post three times a week, working with a different color theme every month.

Chen felt that her studygram encapsulates her personality well. “I’m the girl who sits quietly in class. Outgoing people post pictures of where they hang out and where they eat because that’s how they express themselves. But with my studygram, I’m posting what I do in my free time, so it’s more reflective of who I am,” she said. Her favorite part of having studygram is interacting with people from all over the world, most noticeably Singapore and Malaysia. “Everyone is really friendly. You can slide into dms really easily,” she said. They bond over common interests of K-pop and promote each other on their feeds.

Freshman May Hathaway was inspired to start her studyblr because of her passion for reading, writing, and calligraphy. Her original aesthetic notes invoked motivation to study as well as pride and satisfaction. “If I’m not making study guides and outlining the textbook when I’m supposed to be, I can see that clearly from my Tumblr because I haven’t uploaded pictures,” she said. Taking and posting pictures also does not occupy too much of her time. She spends 15 minutes at most placing her notes under natural lighting and edits her photos in cases of insufficient lighting.

Following other studygram accounts has exposed Hathaway to new ways of taking notes and increasing productivity. For instance, she has used printables, methods of taking careful notes, and outlines of crash course videos to help her better understand her curriculum. She appreciates that the community encourages everyone to study and work hard. Her posts include both reblogs (e.g. notes, bullet journals, and inspirational messages) and original content, the latter which she posts roughly once a week. “I post some stuff that’s not entirely study-related and more about self-care, and I have a lot of interaction with my followers,” she said. “For example, I recently did blogrates, [where one rates and promotes fellow blogs].” Overall, she describes her studyblr as “cute,” “aesthetically pleasing,” and “happy.”

Sophie Dansereau, a Canadian university student majoring in literature, contended that studyblrs are incredibly important because they bring learning to social media. “In the world of fake news, it's more than necessary to center our communities around learning and education. It gives the opportunity for people to share their knowledge as well as their culture in a positive community that is built on openness and willingness to learn,” Dansereau said in an e-mail interview. When asked to describe her studyblr, unefilledepapier, she said, “feminist, literature-oriented agglomeration of posts.”

Despite the general friendliness of the studyblr community, elitism remains. “People feel that their posts and notes need to be of a certain standard or aesthetic to ‘fit in,’” German study blogger Sorcha Griffin of griffin-studies wrote in an e-mail interview. This includes having stationary and supplies of certain brands, good lighting, calligraphy skills, and lightening filters. However, to Hathaway, this pressure is not a big deal. “I’m definitely able to have a fully functioning studyblr without nice stationery,” she elaborated. “I bought new highlighters after creating my studyblr, but I really like them and I think they’re actually really useful outside of the study aesthetic.”

Akam, on the other hand, feels that this has created competition among study bloggers, as more and more study bloggers feel compelled to buy expensive stationery to make their feed stand out. This mentality deviates from the original inspiration for posting: to inspire solid studying habits rather than to keep up with trends and aestheticism. Akam suggests that if study bloggers reverse their mentality to studying, much of the competition would be reduced, and more originality and variation would be produced.

To outsiders, the studyblr community can give off the wrong message. “I think it can sometimes come across as if we're all focused on our studies and only our studies. Or that we promote studying 24/7 with no breaks. Those kind of assumptions are definitely not true. In this community, we are all about being realistic and having a healthy relationship with studying,” Akam said.