Joelle Park ’19 knows who she is, and it’s inspiring. She mixes confidence with humility, hoop earrings with sports jerseys and badass dance moves with Bible study. She has mastered the anecdote. One time, Park used a penny board as her main form of transportation around campus, but she ran over a pebble, suffered the self described “lamest-fall-ever” and was confined to a cast for the rest of the term. One time, she was training for possible problem scenarios as an undergraduate advisor, and the simulation actors started crawling across furniture and throwing things, basically morphing into the cafeteria jungle scene from “Mean Girls.” One time, Park decided to make some YouTube videos and accidentally became semi-famous.
“It started out with videos for student council,” she explained.
Park began filming and editing videos to accompany her school’s Monday morning announcements sophomore year of high school. The videos showcased students with special talents and unique stories. Park made fashion and makeup tutorials and eventually expanded to include other types of videos.
“It started out so bad,” she laughed. “Really low quality, embarrassing makeup tutorials. After a while I noticed that people were actually watching them, so I started to include travel videos and advice videos about relevant issues in high school. I started to do more of what I wanted to do.”
Park still loves beauty and fashion, and she’s a part of a makeup and fashion partnership on YouTube. The partnership creates networks of YouTubers, collecting and redistributing their individual monetary earnings in exchange for connections with different sponsorships and endorsements.
“It gets you more legitimacy in the YouTube world,” she said.
Park defines herself as a “floater,” spanning many different groups on campus, even to the point of being over-involved.
Her family tells her to, “calm down, do less.”
At school, she is a UGA for a group of ’20s who love her so much that they nominated her to be in this issue on beauty. She dances for both Street Soul and Ujima, although she’s taking a break from Ujima this term. She is also involved with Agape and Christian Union, which provide two different forums to talk about religion. Christian Union is larger and more institutionalized, so it has resources like adult staff members and guest speakers. Agape, she explained, is a specifically Asian and Asian-American Christian fellowship, so it often discusses issues of race in relation to faith.
“It’s all very relatable and applicable to specific issues on campus,” she said. “It’s student-run, so we are learning and growing together.”
