Written by Katie Russell

Quotes from Kareem Fawal (alum) 

“I first realized that [a video I posted to Vine] was getting a lot of attention after about 20 to 30 minutes. I sent it to about 3 or 4 Twitter accounts that had 20k – 70k followers. After they posted it on their wall, it started to boom really fast. It wasn’t until a day later where bigger accounts started posting it.”

“After posting the video, I expected a lot of my friends to retweet and share the video, so my hopes of it getting popular were already high from the start, but I didn’t know it was going to be Internet viral.”

“I considered it viral when people started tagging me in it on Facebook and Instagram, and I got emails from TV companies. Basically all kinds of social media were posting my video: Facebook, Twitter, Vine, YouTube and Instagram.”

“One of the representatives from Fullscreen, Inc. emailed me regarding my Vine channel saying if I composed all of my Vine clips and posted it on YouTube and sent him the link, I could possibly make some money if they found any of my Vines to be amusing. I felt that I could possibly go somewhere with this, but I chose not to proceed with it because I was too overwhelmed with everybody seeing my video and knowing that I went to Gunn. It was too much so I ended up deleting my Vine account.”

“At the moment I had no regrets about deleting my account, but now I realize that it was a very good start for me to actually get noticed. I had 6k followers which was 6k more than all of my friends. But I don’t really care about it much anymore. If I ever consider doing Vines again then I can always start over.”

Fawal’s Vine is unavailable as he deleted the account following his rise to popularity online.