Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photos: Screenshots from @r0mymars on TikTok

A couple of years ago, the end of summer’s hottest social-media trend was watching a bunch of teenage girls navigate the intricacies, heartbreaks, and joys of rush week at the University of Alabama. While Bama Rush still plays out on the FYP, it’s become a little passé. However, if you’re still in the market to watch a young woman document her transition to college, I have just the person for you: Romy Mars.

Mars, the daughter of Sofia Coppola and Phoenix front man Thomas Mars, has spent the last two weeks making TikToks about starting her first year at Lehigh University. While it seems like this is what most college freshmen do now, Mars is not most college freshmen. She first gained notoriety in 2023, when she made a TikTok about getting grounded after trying to use her father’s credit card to charter a helicopter to see her camp friends. Since then, she’s accumulated almost half-a-million TikTok followers and released a single, “A-Lister,” that has over 4.5 million streams on Spotify. This is all to say, it’s surprising that she’s in college at all, let alone on a 6,000-student campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.

Mars explained her decision to go down the normal-girl route in a recent video, reading aloud from her first college assignment. “I write songs and I’m a recorded artist, so I’m hoping this writing class will inspire me to write better songs,” Mars said. “I wasn’t even going to apply to college. No one in my family went, but one of my engineers (person who deals with all the buttons and tech in a music studio) said it would be good for me to have a foundation.”

To wrap things up, Mars added, “Also, someone on Twitter said, ‘What is she even talking about,’ in reference to one of my songs, and that was the final thing that urged me to seek an education.” She’s funny!

Now that she’s getting inspired to write better songs via a bachelor’s degree, Mars is still posting a lot of her usual content — stories about wealthy-city-kid high jinks, hot pop-culture takes — but this time, she’s doing it from a twin XL bed. There’s something about her filming front-facing videos with a mini-fridge in the background that makes all of this infinitely more entertaining.

Her commenters seem to feel the same. “U should just rule the world lowkey like i think u have the power,” one shared under a video she made about watching her dad crowd-surf. I agree. It is really cool to post dorm-room GRWM content set to your own pop song.

The best part of her TikToks is that Mars knows what the people want, and what we want is a tasteful mix of “my mom is famous” and “first day of freshman year.” Nowhere is this balance better struck than in a photo dump Mars posted to the app on Thursday, which included BTS shots of Jacob Elordi on the set of Priscilla, a candid of Kirsten Dunst, and a photo of Mars dropping it low in front of a Lehigh University campus police car.

I’m sure we’re all thinking the same thing: This would make for a really good Sofia Coppola movie. Well, those take a long time to make. Instead, Mars is giving you the goods right now, on TikTok, and we should all be thankful for it. As a viewer, I’d love to see Mars do a dining-hall food review soon, and then maybe a story time about what the vibe was like on the set of Megalopolis. Show me another college influencer with that kind of range!

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