How the coronavirus lockdown helped one medical student’s YouTube career grow.
By Katie Parry
When the UK went into national lockdown, everyone was affected. Businesses and schools were forced to close, leaving many worried about what the future might hold. And while 24-year-old Anthonia Adefolaju was unable to study for her dream career, it did bring some positives for her side career – her YouTube channel.
Anthonia is in her fourth year of studying medicine at the University of Liverpool. She has a YouTube channel on the side, and mainly uploads videos about her experiences with med school to try and help potential future medical students.
She said: “I noticed there was a distinct lack of black medical students from the UK making content on YouTube with a lack of any kind of following. I wanted to try and plug that gap.”
The lockdown allowed her to focus on videos other than medical school related content, as the University of Liverpool moved all their classes to online.
One video she uploaded in June 2020 got almost 300,000 views, a significant difference from her previous videos that often got less than 1000 views.
The video is a commentary where Anthonia compares the situations between Shane Dawson and Jenna Marbles, two Youtubers who left their platforms last year due to past racist content.
“The only reason I made that video was because I had seen a couple of people on Twitter comparing the Jenna Marbles situation with the Shane Dawson situation,” said Anthonia.
“I was looking at them both in parallel but I just didn’t feel it was correct to group them in the same box because I felt the things they had done and the way they had responded were different.
“I jotted some things down, my lectures had been cancelled and at that time my exams had been cancelled. I had a bit of free time so I decided to jot out an outline.
“My camera wasn’t working at that time so I filmed it on my phone. The audio’s terrible.
“It’s not my best piece of work in my opinion but for some reason it just took off and it brought in a lot of traffic to my channel.
“I would have never made that video if it wasn’t for the pandemic because at the time I released that video in June, I would have been revising for exams.”
After this, Anthonia’s channel became more of a mix between medical school related content and more commentary and opinion videos.
More of Anthonia’s work can be found here.