Carolina Pulido starts her day off just like any other CSUN student. She wakes up in her dorm, gets ready for her first class of the day and checks her social media. The difference is that she is greeted by thousands of likes and hundreds of comments.

This is nothing new to Pulido; rather, it is a routine that has been built over five years of work.

Pulido, widely known as @awake_snake on Instagram, has over 200,000 followers across her social media platforms and has built a long-standing community through online memes.

“Originally, it was just a spam page for people I knew. I was just kind of posting, like, funny things I saw on the internet,” Pulido said. “It wasn’t until 2022, when I was away studying abroad, that it actually started blowing up like crazy. Then from there, it kind of just became a meme page. I just thought, ‘Oh what the heck, there’s more people, I’ll just post more.’”

Pulido’s posts are not intended to gain mass attention but rather reflect who she is as a person. Her interests in comedy, film and music are present throughout her page.

“I post stuff that I find funny or relatable, so it’s like very much my brand of humor and, like, people who’ve been following for a while know what I like because you’ll randomly see Hannibal memes just thrown throughout the regular stuff,” Pulido said.

Her account isn’t always intended to make people laugh. With such a large following, Carolina also uses her platform to highlight problems that she sees in the world that don’t get as much attention.

For meme pages with large followings, posting personal political ideologies isn’t too common. Losing massive numbers of followers and threats loom large when deciding to post personal beliefs, but Pulido says that doesn’t bother her.

“I’ll see something that disturbs me, and I think more people should be talking about this, more people should be thinking about this,” Pulido said. “But it just gets lost among everything else people are looking at. I have this platform, and I want to use it. So, anytime I post anything that’s politics or something, I do get a few death threats.”

When problems like these arise, Pulido must pick her battles wisely. Responding to every hate comment she receives, she said, will not solve any problems.

“The block button is your friend. Once I was like, ‘Oh, I can just block this person,’ it got a lot easier,” Pulido said.

The personality she has infused into her posts, along with her willingness to share personal beliefs, has humanized her in the eyes of her followers.

What began as “just a meme page” for friends attracted a community of empathetic followers that she consistently engages with. Her daily interactions with this audience have transformed her online presence into something meaningful and personal.

“I like reading comments a lot, I like responding to comments pretty frequently,” she said. “When I would post about how I’m doing this late assignment, ‘It’s like 3 a.m., this sucks.’ I would have people be like, ‘Hey, you got it, keep going, you’re almost there,’ and it’s just cool to have that kind of community behind you for things.”

With an immense audience at her back, she uses her platform to promote what she really loves: film.

As a film major, her love for movies started while living in Fresno with her family when she was young.

“My dad likes movies, and he would put on family movies that we would watch all together,” she said. “I remember them really fondly, because people are always busy, and crazy things are always happening in life, but like, we would watch a movie together and it would always make me feel better.”

The comfort she found in film encouraged her to produce that same warmth for others by helping to create stories that inspire and generate relatable personalities that can influence audiences.

The importance of this form of art to Pulido has been immense, as she looks forward to getting into post-production after she graduates. Editing and writing have always been an escape for her from a young age.

“I love storytelling, I think it’s the heart of it all. I think something like that can make someone’s life better,” Pulido said, “Funnily enough, I got into editing because my friend put me on the show ‘Voltron’ in seventh grade. I was always on YouTube watching edits people have made for ‘Voltron,’ and I thought, ‘I can do that, and I can do it better.’”

Pulido’s hard work is paying off, and as her meme page grows, her dream job becomes all the more of a reality in the near future.