UF students are flooding social media with their personal stories using the hashtag #UFBackstory.
Members of a UF Christian student organization CRU, or Campus Crusaders for Christ, are sharing how God has changed their lives and tagging the posts with #UFBackstory. So far the videos have spread to 45 countries.
The hashtag has been used at other universities, and it was through a Florida State University student that the UF backstory coordinator, 20-year-old Maryann Magid, heard about it.
“When I heard about it, it was something I really wanted to do at UF,” the behavioral and cognitive neuroscience junior said. “My friends at FSU said they had some really great reactions and a lot of people viewed the videos.”
Magid said the CRU staff was hoping for at least 50 videos to be uploaded, while she herself was praying for 100. Since she last checked there have been 182 videos uploaded and more than 155,000 views combined.
Erica Bahrenburg, a 20-year-old UF telecommunication junior and a leader in her community group at CRU, is one of the people who has already shared her backstory.
“I was a little frightened because I didn’t know what the repercussions were going to be,” Bahrenburg said, “but I think it’s important to share why we believe in this and why this is so important in our lives.”
She said she hopes people who watch the videos think about how Christians really are versus what they thought they were like.
“Backstory is for everyone,” Bahrenburg said. “I think our testimonies say that hey, we’re human, we don’t always do the right things, sometimes we mess up, but this is something that I have in my life that makes it worth living.”
[A version of this story ran on page 9 on 2/2/2015 under the headline “Students share #UFBackstories"]
