Harvard YouTube star helps others navigate college — and life
John Fish ’21 started his YouTube channel as part of a technology communications class during his senior year of high school in Waterloo, Ontario. Coincidentally, it was up and running around the time he got into Harvard, so he arrived to campus with 1,000 followers. “I thought of documenting coming to Harvard, this mysterious process that so many people are interested in,” he recalled. “No one had done that before. It started as daily vlogs, which were pretty bad.” But today Fish is a bona fide YouTube star, a self-help motivational guru with a subscriber base of 435,000 and counting. In his room in Dunster House hangs a framed silver “play” button, a gift from the company when he hit 100,000 subscribers (he will get a gold one if he hits 1 million). A self-described “pseudo-celebrity,” Fish, who is concentrating in computer science, uses personal experiences to inform his content with the...