Woe upon you who doesn’t read Wesleying—campus life has been passing you by.
Unless you’re a freshman, this doesn’t apply to you; of course you read Wesleying. But if you’re new in town, and you haven’t found your way there yet, take heed.
Wesleying.org is an independent, student-run blog that covers “real student life at Wesleyan University.” By no means comprehensive, the blog usually relies on student groups to submit their own events. Zach Schonfeld ’13, who has managed Wesleying since last fall, calls it a “loosely affiliated collective of student bloggers who are all involved in and enthusiastic about different segments of student life at Wesleyan.”
Although Schonfeld administrates the blog, it mostly runs itself.
“There’s no formal hierarchy of editorial staff,” he said. “The purpose of the blog is to provide a voice about student life, strictly by students; to unify different segments of student life; and to be a source of information, news, and some degree of commentary and humor and irreverence in a distinctly Wesleyan way.”
In the view of Wesleying contributor Anwar Batte ’13, whose distinctive posts often take on a recognizably unhinged tone (“That’s what happens when you’re criminally insane: people can tell,” he said), Wesleying serves several simultaneous roles.
“It can be as narrow as an events billboard,” Batte said. “But a lot of people like it as a features thing with interesting links.”
According to a recent post titled “Westrospective: Wesleying’s Founding, Five Years On,” prepared this past August by Schonfeld and Batte, the blog was founded in August 2006 by Xue Sun and Holly Wood, both ’08 (real names).
Their first post ended with a two-pronged ultimatum: “1) Biatch, we do what we want, and 2) We just might be hyperactive enough to be everywhere at once.”
Sun and Wood—who are now graduate students at Yale and Harvard, respectively—quickly found that they had filled an important niche, and traffic began to grow. And it has not stopped growing. Since early 2009 alone, the blog has been viewed 4,528,404 times, with an all time daily high of 42,085 on May 6, 2009, the day Johanna Justin-Jinich ’10 was murdered.
“We have the capacity to publish news as it breaks, so when urgent things are happening, students often turn to Wesleying for updates,” Schonfeld said. “That’s one of the main roles the blog plays.”
Many students began reading the blog before arriving on campus or during orientation.
“I found it before I applied when I was searching for information about Wesleyan,” said Silvia Miteva ’15. “Before you apply to a school, you have to know something about it.”
Wesleying is at the heart of student life on campus, and we recommend that you read it, and have your mother read it too: she’ll feel “in the loop” without your telling her anything.
“I heard about Wesleyan for the first time in an article about MGMT,” said Rachel Pincus ’13. “I heard about Wesleying from my mom.”
Disclaimer: This reporter has contributed to Wesleying.