Tiahra has always loved connecting with people, and now she’s able to do that on two seemingly unrelated fronts.
First is through her studies, as right now she’s in her last semester for health care, public health, and health education. Health had always been an interest for her, especially since she has plenty of family working in the field through roles like nursing and medical sales. For Tiahra, the most interesting part of this field is helping people directly by focusing on changing their behaviors. This means things like planning and implementing events like seminars or workshops for targeted audiences on topics such as obesity or AIDS prevention. Tiahra’s work is just like Hippocrates’s quote, “The greatest medicine of all is teaching people not to need it.”
The second way Tiahra connects with people is through her content. When Tiahra was younger and Vine was popping off, she thought being a full-time viner would be amazing, but never really got into it. Fast-forward a couple years and Tiahra is on lockdown from COVID and she’s hearing everyone talk about TikTok, which was something she never took seriously since it looked like it was just for dancing. Friends told Tiahra that she was funny and would do great on TikTok since it’s a platform for far more than dances, so she got started. At this time, Tiahra was only on the app for fun and had no intention of building a massive audience, but her numbers just kept growing as she kept uploading.
The pivotal moment in Tiahra’s growth on social media was when her first brand deal came around. It was a giveaway collaboration with Princess Polly, and Tiahra loved the idea of being able to give back to her community. Being able to monetize moved content from being just a fun side hobby to something with real life-changing potential.
With Tiahra’s explosive growth came growing pains, and for her they came in the form of trying to manage creating content that she wants to do v.s. making the content that pleases others. TikTok has a way of pushing you toward creating certain types of content, even if that’s not what you actually want to do, so it was a learning experience for Tiahra to find balance between doing things that she loves and things that other people really want to see.
On the flip side of growing pains, Tiahra’s unexpected rise also brought her some great things. Her favorite parts of having a community is interacting with them in little ways, like by going live or through polls. Connecting with other content creators is another massive door that has been opened through this, since she’s able to meet other people with the same passion for creating as she does.
Even though she could go easily full-time with content creation with her 4.6M followers, Tiahra is still finishing up her degree. She says that this is really because she wants to display how important education is, since there are so many things her time in college taught her that social media could not. Tiahra also wants to show that life doesn’t have to be this OR that, since with some hard work it’s possible to excel at both!
Now that Tiahra’s degree is coming to a close, she’s at a crossroads. Does she take the leap and do content all-time, or does she put social media on the backburner to focus on her career. You might have guessed her answer- it’s to combine the two together! Public health is all about trying to influence people’s behavior, just like content is, so Tiahra has the opportunity to combine her passion for content creation with her drive for helping others to change millions of lives. If you want to get your life changed too, you can find Tiahra on TikTok @tiahranelson and YouTube @tiahranelson!
