Middle Tennessee State University has a TikTok star on campus, but it may not be who you would think. Raj Srivastava, a marketing professor who has just completed his second decade at MTSU, has over 180,000 followers on the popular social media app, which led him to compete on Jimmy Fallon’s new show, ‘On-Brand.’
His story begins when he dropped his daughter off at college, and they decided to make a TikTok for his social media marketing class. All he planned to do was create some introductory videos for his classes.
“I told her, you know what? I teach social media, I need to be on some social media,” Srivastava said.
From there, his videos went viral, increasing from 10,000 views in a few hours to 80,000 in a single day. The marketing professor went from entertaining a class of 30 to inspiring the entire country.
Srivastava continued his journey by researching the app, learning more about the content and gaining assistance from his teacher assistant and Justin Tart, a student in the College of Media and Entertainment. As he got more views, the educator began to take his social media more seriously.
In the fall of 2021, he decided to post one video a day for the next 1,000 days. Over the span of those 1,000 days, he had at least 10 videos that exceeded one million views. Srivastava said the point of this experiment was to gain experience.
“It gave me instant credibility,” Srivastava said. “People looked at it [TikTok] and said this guy knows what he’s doing.”
His hard work took him to new heights this year when a casting director for NBC commented on one of his videos, asking if he would be interested in appearing on a show. At first, Srivastava didn’t take it seriously because it blended in with the noise of other comments, until it didn’t.
When the casting director texted him, he knew he had to hear him out. He then went through two Zoom interviews and seven rounds of presentations before he was invited onto “On-Brand.”
From there, the experience began as they were flown to New York for filming. Although Srivastava was only there for 24 days, he was able to work with nine other contestants around Bozoma Saint John and Jimmy Fallon.
“Luckily for us, both of them were extremely good, extremely fun and extremely nice,” Srivastava said. “We typically only hear the stereotypes, and we don’t hear the real thing.”
Throughout his time on the show, Srivastava gained new insights into himself and what he wanted to bring back to his students. He enjoyed the experience of doing new things and seeing the unique personalities of each contestant in their work.
One thing that Srivastava continues to do is inspire people to try new things and grab onto new experiences. He said he could never have imagined having this experience, but he also didn’t let anyone tell him he couldn’t.
“Don’t ever think that you will not succeed,” said Srivastava. “Let the circumstances, let the person, let someone else tell you you cannot.”
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