Finding Happy News During a Pandemic
How I changed my startup to become useful and relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic, & why you should, too.
On Tuesday, March 10th, when Harvard students learned that we’d be forced to move out of our dorm rooms in just five days, our campus turned to chaos. The famous eviction-notice email, blasted from Harvard’s president to the entire student body, circulated around social media in rapid fire, with accompanying captions of disbelief and anxiety.
This semester is my last at Harvard, and I am enrolled in the final course I needed for my Computer Science degree; an independent research class for which I am developing and building software. For the past nine months, I’ve been conducting technological research in the high-fashion industry, particularly how image recognition models can help high-fashion brands (such as Dior or Marc Jacobs) better adapt to e-commerce.
I’d send weekly newsletters to my fans (mainly, my parents and boyfriend), sharing what my analytics would tell me was trending or was out of style. Fashion and fashion trends were the areas to which I’d dedicate the majority of my time and thoughts.
Suddenly, though, as if everything had happened overnight, life started to look completely different.
After the COVID-19 epidemic started getting closer and closer to the United States and, eventually, kicked us out of college, it felt silly to keep talking about the latest fashion trends. I didn’t feel like people cared about my superfluous findings anymore, like which new-season bag they should buy, or what color blazer is more in right now (the answer, if you’re wondering, is beige).
I knew peoples’ minds were elsewhere, because my mind was elsewhere. Campus conversations went from casual catch-ups to emotional goodbyes, tears, and wondering when we’d all meet again. It was, for lack of better words, very sad.
Scrolling through social media, in turn, became an echo chamber of this campus-wide stress and upset. I began to crave everything — anything — that could bring me even the slightest fraction of distraction and positivity.
So, I decided to put my data-fashion-trend newsletter on hold. I love the work I do in high-fashion data analytics, but I knew that wasn’t what my surrounding community; my college peers, friends, and family needed at the moment. What they needed, and what I needed, was an optimistic distraction. Two hours of fiddling around on Squarespace and MailChimp later, News Makes Me Happy was born.
I slapped a cheesy smiley-face onto a cartoon newspaper for a logo, and started sending out three, happy stories everyday to my subscribers. Nowhere, in any of my newsletters, did I mention the coronavirus pandemic. I wanted to provide people with an escape from all the scary, COVID-related news, even if this distraction lasted only for a little while.
News Makes Me Happy has been alive for two weeks now, and has since reached over two-hundred subscribers. It has gained more traction in a shorter amount of time than any app or tech-project I’ve developed throughout my four years of college. I don’t monetize it in any way, and I don’t plan to. Not only does this newsletter help me find slivers of positivity to hold on to, but I know it is also giving my community something they can, and want to, hold onto at the moment.
For a lot of student startup founders, it can certainly feel like our work and goals have been put on hold due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I don’t think, though, that it has to be this way.
Throughout these next couple of months, under lockdowns and quarantine, it is crucial to be creating and producing, in order to help others live easier, happier lives. Think about the ways in which you can be useful; in which the skills that you’ve acquired through other projects can be applied to make the world better, and give it what it needs, right now.
We don’t have to give up anything, per se; we solely have to pivot our work to be relevant with regards to how the world has, suddenly and unexpectedly, changed. For me, my fashion-interest is still alive and well, and I make sure to include at least one article from Vogue in every happy newsletter.
My high-fashion-tech research, if you’re wondering, is also pivoting to become as useful as can be during this time. The high-fashion industry is taking a tremendous hit due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and both production & consumer tendencies are going to look completely different on the other side. The best I can do, consequently, is use the tools and analytics I currently have to keep up with these inevitable changes.
I hope that News Makes Me Happy helps spread some happiness and comfort to you during this difficult time, and I hope that, if you’ve got an entrepreneurial fire within you, you keep it burning.
You can subscribe, for free, at NewsMakesMeHappy.com, and, please, do forward me any happy news stories you happen to come across. It’s harder to find them than you think.
I’m a senior at Harvard studying computer science, researching the intersection between fashion & technology. Currently, I run the daily News Makes Me Happy newsletter. Read my research here, & feel free to get in touch.
