College Memes: University Meme Pages

Y U NO has college meme?

In the past week, college newspapers across the country have been picking up on school-specific "memes," a phenomenon gaining momentum on social media sites.

An Internet meme, as the website Know Your Meme explains, "is a piece of content or an idea that's passed from person to person, changing and evolving along the way." This, of course, stands in contrast to "viral content," which is rapidly transmitted but does not change.

With websites like Meme Generator and Quickmeme, users can take one of a catalogue of popular images and add their own captions.

College students have capitalized on these design tools to create memes poking fun at campus life, and Facebook "community" pages are perhaps the most common venue to share college memes with other students. These pages have been popping up rapidly over the last week, and college papers are catching on:

University of Texas news site the Horn, for instance, reports 14,000 "likes" on the UT Memes Facebook page in a mere week. NYU's the Local and the Ithacan of Ithaca College discuss the addictive nature (sleepless nights! extreme procrastination! problem sets undone and papers unwritten!) of these meme pages. Duke and Boston University newspapers similarly comment on the growing trend in recent articles.

With a number of college meme Facebook pages already in existence, many of the same images have been captioned by savvy students in ways that demonstrate the particular characters of different schools. Of course, some of the school pages have hundreds of posts from students of a variety of walks of life, and the images have a slew of different captions that often include "inside jokes" from that school. Check out our slideshow to see a few of the more common ones and what they seem to say about the schools that made them -- or, if nothing else, because they're pretty darn funny.