By Zolan Kanno-Youngs, News correspondent
The basis of journalism has always been storytelling. It is the process of making the unaware, or even the ignorant, aware of something they otherwise wouldn’t know.
People often find it hard to keep up with all of the news going on throughout the world, but who can blame them? There are a lot of people out there. There are also a lot of people on this campus – and the number is growing. How many different people do you think one student passes on their way to one of their classes? How many of those people do you think they actually know anything about?
Learning about someone different from you accelerates the learning process, no matter what major you are in. The more people continue to remain within their exclusive groups, the more Northeastern is in danger of becoming a campus where students ignore the common similarities and unique differences of people they don’t know.
However, one of the newest initiatives on campus, Faces of Northeastern University (FONU) aims to counteract that. Similar to Portraits of Boston, this initiative will use photos to allow students to learn about each other.
Founded Sep. 17 by two sophomores, international affairs and human service double major Gemma Bonfiglioli and business administration major Leonidas Kalai, this photography project looks to prevent what so many up-and-coming colleges risk: becoming a university where students stop caring about the similarities and differences of their peers.
The project consists of Bonfiglioli and Kalai taking photographs of different students and staff members on campus and adding it to the FONU Facebook page with a unique quote or message from the person in the image. However, the sophomores never include a name with the photo, just the image and a quote.
“It’s to capture the stories of the different lives of the people that you see everyday, people you pass by,” Bonfiglioli said. “You never really question who they are, they’re just faceless.”
In one week’s time, the Facebook page already has 1,149 likes.
Bonfiglioli and Kalai were inspired late in their freshman year, after realizing that while walking to their classes in a sea of students, no one really seemed to care – or notice – all of the different people around them. With a model from Humans of New York, a similar project that has received national attention, the two knew the time was right to do something about it.
“All we’re trying to do is showcase something personal about these individuals that you otherwise wouldn’t notice,” Kalai said.
Students already enter the university without those personal characteristics defined in their identity; a majority of us are accepted as a printed name, a GPA and a test score. Unless we take the time to branch out from our comfortable cliques, then we will fail to further relate – and thus learn – from the identities of our peers.
“These are personal insights, advice maybe, which can shed a lot of light on someone’s upbringing,” Kalai said. “Someone’s current state of mind that you would miss out on if you looked at them as class rank or SAT score.”
One photograph on the site features a seemingly joyous female student sporting a sweater. Her quote is a response to the question, “What differentiates you from your peers?”
“My desire to constantly be in revolt against everything around me,” she said. “I like to keep questioning things.”
While it is concise, one could not have obtained that information by simply walking past this woman. It is a short preview of what could be a unique story about an ordinary Northeastern student.
This is why Faces of Northeastern has the potential to be so successful, rather than trying to make a profit, the project is focusing on allowing students to tell their story.
“Everyone has something really interesting to say, but they never have a platform to share and an audience to actually listen, so this can be a platform,” Kalai said.
