As we look back at 2025, the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ College social media accounts shared more than a thousand posts — read on for more details — but these 10 posts (and one honorable mention) were particularly memorable for the impact they had. Here’s a look back at some of the moments that captured the attention of not just our community, but the world’s as well.

The top posts across our social media platforms reflect natural campus beauty, student and alumni success, the thrilling arrival of the new class, and some sage advice to the departing one, the Class of 2025.

This year the @batescollege accounts made 1,552 posts (remember Instagram stories, while fleeting, count!), which received 10.58 million impressions, reached 5.68 million users, and garnered 259,730 engagements (likes, comments, shares, saves), and 707,620 video views.

• Instagram:1,004 posts
• 200 photo posts, 37 video reels, and 767 stories
• Facebook: 266 posts
• LinkedIn: 221 posts
• TikTok: 61 posts

Below you’ll find our top 10 posts of the year, plus one honorable mention too pretty to leave out, ranked by the number of total views they received. But we’ve also included the unique users reached and the number of engagements each post received. See what the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ and broader online community liked, commented on, and shared the most:

(Honorable mention) – The aurora borealis is #ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝Bound

ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Communications and Marketing editorial assistant and creator of a new but already popular Instagram account for a get-outdoors women’s group she founded, Hannah Kothari ’26 of Houston grabbed these beautiful images of the aurora borealis lighting up the sky over campus. She was kind enough to share these cell phone shots with the social media team. Thanks to Kothari, these images made up the 11th most-viewed post of 2025, earning an honorable mention.

Date published: November 14

Platform: Instagram
Views: 53,073
Reach: 10,275
Engagements: 2,083

10. ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Admission waives application fee

Since its founding in 1855, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ has always been committed to the value that a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ education ought to be open to any deserving student, regardless of their background. And in that spirit, the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Office of Admission took the step of opening the doors to a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ education a little wider by announcing in mid-September that they would waive the $65 application fee starting with the Fall 2025 pool of applicants. Bobcats near and far were heartened by the decision and our #10 post was shared widely by the community.

Date published: September 18

Platform: Instagram
Views: 55,610
Reach: 16,909
Engagements: 1,456

9. Jose Carmona ’25 and his “Lewiston grandmother”

When we say the city of Lewiston is our home, we mean it. And no story this year illustrated that feeling quite like the heartwarming connection between Jose Carmona ’25 of Chicago and his Lewiston “grandmother” Carmen Thibodeau. Jose was the last of a family of four to graduate (his three siblings, Christopher ’18, Alanis ’18, and Carolina ’22, had also relied on Carmen and her late husband for loving support). Shared in local interest Facebook groups like “Lewiston Rocks,” this story really resonated with our local Lewiston-Auburn community, reaching over 50,000 unique users.

Date published: May 22

Platform: Facebook
Views: 56,993
Reach: 54,847
Engagements: 915

8. ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Football wins home opener on 150th anniversary

It’s always exciting to watch the Bobcats win a football game at Garcelon. But at home, in double overtime, and during the 150th anniversary of ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ football celebration game? That is something truly special. Down 23-7 at the end of the third quarter, the Bobcats found a way to claw back into the game and give us a victory for the history books.

Date published: September 13

Platform: Instagram (collaboration with , , and )
Views: 61,858
Reach: 17,289
Engagements: 1,484

7. Perla Figuereo ’21 wins Squid Game: The Challenge Season 2

When one of your young alumni is the winner of the second largest gameshow jackpot ($4.56M) in television history, it’s kind of a big deal. So it’s no surprise that when Perla Figuereo ’21 won season two of Netflix’s Squid Game: The Challenge, the news of her success resonated with Bobcat nation. As we noted in our post, the theater and rhetoric, film, and screen studies double major, and former ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ student government co-president “played with heart, strategy, kindness, and determination.” This post had ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ies chiming in unison, “Go, Perla, go!”

Date published: November 19

Platform: Instagram (collaboration with )
Views: 63,719
Reach: 15,891
Engagements: 1,517

6. ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ welcomes the Class of 2029 to campus (and Dean James Reese moves in Ishan Reese ’29)

There’s nothing quite like the energy of welcoming a brand-new class as the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ community comes together to greet them. The air is filled with hope and possibility and it is awe-inspiring to see so many students helping the newest members of the campus community get settled. Add ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ icon Dean Reese (also known as Associate Dean for International Student Programs James Reese) and his wife Sonali Reese ’93 moving their son Ishan ’29 into his new dorm room in Adams Hall, and you know you’ve got a winner.

Date published: August 25

Platform: Instagram
Views: 70,293
Reach: 19,685
Engagements: 1,860

5. Fun fall foliage “find and seek” game

We couldn’t resist this one. When a scavenger hunt–style trend took off across social media, we just *had* to put a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ spin on it — featuring our iconic maple tree outside Hedge Hall. The result? A post our community loved playing along with and kept coming back to for one more look.

Date published: August 12

Platform: Instagram
Views: 74,396
Reach: 27,127
Engagements: 1,288

4. ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ field hockey wins first NESCAC championship in program history!

This one hardly needs explanation. We’re still celebrating the way the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Field Hockey team made college history by defeating Wesleyan 2-0 to secure the program’s first NESCAC Championship culminating in a 16-4 season. Go Bobcats!!!

Date published: November 9

Platform: Instagram (collaboration with and )
Views: 120,259
Reach: 42,809
Engagements: 2,642

3. Debut of Strata by Laura Poppick ’10 featured in Rolling Stone

Some viral moments are somewhat predictable (hello, Squid Game win and NESCAC Championship), and some are pure algorithmic magic. This alumni shoutout celebrating Laura Poppick ’10 and her debut book, Strata, , took off — reaching nearly 112,000 unique users, far beyond ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝’ total Facebook audience of 27,000 followers. Mystery aside, the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ pride is very real. Congratulations, Laura!

Date published: July 1

Platform: Facebook
Views: 147,480
Reach: 111,983
Engagements: 1,105

2. Viral clip “Cellphones are adult pacifiers” from Angela Duckworth’s ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Commencement address

As you make your way through this list, our No. 2 pick takes on a challenge many of us know well: how phones and social media compete for our attention, our shared sense that they are probably not great for us, and what we can or should do about it. ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Commencement speaker, researcher, and Grit author Angela Duckworth addressed this head-on in her 2025 Commencement remarks. A clip from her address resonated widely, providing the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Class of 2025 — and Instagram viewers everywhere — some “situation modification” tools to resist the constant pull of phones and social media in the digital age. And yes, the irony of this advice spreading so successfully on social media is not lost on us.

Date published: June 18

Platform: Instagram reels (collaboration with )
Views: 363,908
Reach: 287,758
Engagements: 38,058

1. Angela Duckworth’s complete Commencement address, “Push those cell phones away” from ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Commencement 2025

If you thought the Instagram clip of Angela Duckworth’s 2025 ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Commencement address did well, just wait until you see the numbers on the full YouTube video! It’s clear that people around the world are thinking deeply about how to reclaim their attention from their phone and specifically social media. Our excerpt of Duckworth’s address from Commencement received more than 400,000 views and 23,000 engagements.

Date published: May 30

Platform: YouTube
Views: 430,510
Reach: n/a — YouTube does not calculate an estimated unique reach
Engagements: 23,310

Among this season’s Commencement speakers, Dr. Nirav Shah, the director of the Maine Center for Disease Control who will deliver the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Commencement address on Sunday, May 29, owns one of the most active and entertaining feeds.

Throughout the pandemic, Shah has peppered his serious and straightforward public-health guidance — and there’s lot of it — with social and scientific insights often delivered with wit and humor, serving his 30,000-plus followers a steady diet of puns and dad jokes, plus parody, satire, and outright sarcasm.

The net effect: galvanizing popular support for COVID policies while dismantling specious arguments against them.

Here are 10 of our favorite Nirav Shah tweets.

1. Pointing out the danger of confirmation bias

At ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, students are encouraged to interrogate their biases, an important tool for sorting out fact from fiction. In this tweet, Shah reminds us all how easy it is for our brains to assign truth to the findings that we’re already inclined to agree with.

2. Getting giddy with the Diet Coke account

It became fun to follow the good doctor’s unabashed love of the soda Diet Coke (a “somance?”), including this exchange with the beverage’s Twitter account, ending with serious reminder that it’s the little things that matter — and a punny reference to finding the “light.”

3. No such thing as bad press (or photos)

Shah shares a self-deprecating photo to celebrate vaccine success.

4. He can tease without being mean

Another deft touch, this time responding to a story about vaccination rates by astrological sign.

5. Drawing on a deep trove of pop culture: “conscious uncoupling”

Back in 2014, in a shocking display of Hollywood PR-speak, actor Gwyneth Paltrow infamously referred to her separation from husband Chris Martin, lead singer of Coldplay, as “consciously uncoupling.” In April, Shah mined that pop-culture nugget to educate Mainers on how COVID-19 infections were rising, yet hospitalizations weren’t.

6. Engaging with Stephen King on his microwaved salmon recipe

“You come at the king, you best not miss” — it’s not from Macbeth but The Wire‘s Omar Little. Shah certainly did not miss in his witty rejoinder to a tweet by the legendary Maine author Stephen King, who : microwaving it. Let us repeat that: Microwaving…salmon.

7. Being honest and philosophical about uncertainty

To underscore the near impossibility of accurately identifying and confirming trends while in the midst of a pandemic, Shah ends this tweet sequence with a quote attributed to the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.

8. Setting boundaries when the pandemic fire hose is on you

Even the director of the Maine CDC needs a break from thinking about a pandemic outbreak. Like so many others, with this tweet Shah shows that everyone needs to protect their mental health during this all-encompassing public health challenge.

9. Being human…like letting us see who his best friend might be

Nothing fancy, but always worth saying.

10. Using a big winter storm to satirize those who resist science-driven COVID precautions and guidance

The Onion has nothing on Shah when it comes to using satire and irony to make a point.

In an epic 16-tweet thread last winter as a snowstorm approached, he adopted the persona of a typical anti-science/anti-vaxxer/anti-masker to deliver a withering rebuttal those who oppose science-based guidance.

This first tweet set up the premise:

Then mock-Shah starts hitting his stride. He tweets that he shouldn’t have to salt the walkway he shared with neighbors: “Can’t people who are vulnerable to slips and falls just stay inside?”

Then he references a parking ban to take on folks who oppose shutdowns: “My town implemented a ‘parking ban’ too. They say it’s to help them keep roads cleared. But it really amounts to the government telling me, a taxpayer, what I can and can’t do with my own private property. Didn’t we fight a war against England to prevent this?”

And mentions interstate speed-limit slowdowns to tease folks who generally oppose COVID mandates: “[The state] will reduce the speed limit on the interstate during this supposed ‘storm.’ That is unbelievable! How dare they limit my ability to drive whatever speed I want when conditions aren’t safe?”

Finally, you don’t need gloves!

Fifty years ago on July 20, millions of Americans and people around the world gathered by their TV sets to witness Neil Armstrong becoming the first human to walk on the surface of the Moon.

In celebration of the anniversary of that historic moment and the Apollo 11 mission, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ News reached out to Moon expert . Petro, whose research focuses on the evolution of the lunar crust, is the deputy project scientist for NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter mission.

Petro shared six pieces of information we’ve learned about our closest celestial neighbor since that fateful July day in 1969 — as well as one big lunar mystery we have yet to figure out.

1. The Moon is much older than we thought.

Pre-Apollo, scientists had proposed a variety of ages for the moon, from the hundreds of millions of years into the billions. The Apollo missions helped narrow the range.

“Apollo 11 samples were about 3 billion years old,” Petro says. “Later missions brought back rocks on the order of 4.55 billion years old, reflecting the age of the crust of the Moon.”

2. The moon’s famous craters come from asteroid impacts.

For decades before the 1969 landing, scientists debated what created the Moon’s many craters. Was it asteroids pounding the surface, or volcanic activity below?

Samples from the Apollo missions proved the former. The Moon doesn’t necessarily attract more asteroids than Earth, but because the Moon doesn’t have much of an atmosphere or processes like erosion, impacts leave conspicuous marks.

And Earth and the Moon have a similar history with asteroids.

“The Moon has pristine crater examples that help us interpret how those huge events shape and reshape planetary surfaces,” Petro says. “We know that early in Earth’s history, large impacts occurred with some frequency, based on the record we see on the Moon.”

The Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) simulated what Neil Armstrong saw in those final minutes as he guided the Lunar Module to the surface of the Moon. (NASA)

3. The Moon is seismically active.

”Apollo brought seismometers to the surface, allowing us to measure the activity of the Moon,” Petro says. “Apollo 11’s seismometer showed that impacts and moonquakes could actually shake the Moon.”

4. The Moon tells us about other planets.

Without plate tectonics, an atmosphere, and recent volcanoes to move things around, the crust of the Moon is much better preserved than that of Earth and some other planets. Studying the Moon’s essentially unaltered surface has helped scientists understand the rest of the solar system.

”When we look at the surface of a planet or asteroid or comet, we want to know how old it is,” Petro says. “Because we have samples from the Moon, and we know how old various surfaces of the Moon are, we can extrapolate that to other objects based on how many craters are on that surface, to estimate their ages.”

On the day of the 2017 solar eclipse, Noah Petro ’01 represented NASA at a minor league baseball game, the first that he knows of that included an “eclipse break.” (Photograph courtesy NASA/W. Hrybyk)

5. Pilots make good geologists.

The early astronauts, including the Moon-landers, were recruited from the ranks of military test pilots.

“We discovered former fighter pilots could be good field geologists,” Petro says. “All Apollo astronauts received geology training, which helped them collect an amazing suite of samples while on the surface.”

6. There is water in the Moon.

“Samples of volcanic glass were found in 2009 to have a small amount of water in them, changing our view of the Moon from a dry body to one that may have had water in it when it formed,” Petro says.

7. …but we still don’t know how the Moon formed.

“We think a large object struck the Earth early in its history, causing debris to circle the Earth that came together to form the Moon,” Petro says. But scientists don’t have definitive proof.

“We are now observing the formation of planets in other solar systems and using what we know of the Moon to understand how those planets may evolve.”

Officially a lunatic? Check out more of Petro’s work with the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and its stunning images of later Apollo missions:

Amidst all the exams, papers, and senior theses to write and bind, a bevy of ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ students took time from busy finals-week schedules to put on their artistic hats, snap their best finals-themed photos, and submit them to our annual #ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝Finals instagram contest.

The prize? Instagram immortality itself with a coveted spot on the official Instagram account, curated by Director of Photography and Video Phyllis Graber Jensen, plus a $25 gift card for tasty treats at the Bobcat Den.

Without further ado, here are the five winning submissions.

Ellie Yguico ’20 of Sherman Oaks, Calif.

Ellie’s facial expression and distinctive use of Instagram stickers and her bitmoji really captures how finals week can feel. The struggle is real, Ellie. Yes, it is.

A post shared by (@erinyaa) on Dec 5, 2017 at 10:18pm PST

Emma Soler ’20 of Bethesda, Md.

The motion and exuberance of subject Grace Ellrodt ’20, combined with the bright red of her jacket and in contrast with the snowy white background, had the #ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝Finals Instagram contest committee jumping for joy as well.

A post shared by (@batescollege) on Dec 22, 2017 at 4:55am PST

Catherine Merton ’18 of East Longmeadow, Mass.

A look at Ladd Library from on high. We loved the composition of the desk, chair, and subject, along with the angular arrangement of papers, notebooks, and study materials.

A post shared by (@batescollege) on Dec 23, 2017 at 4:27am PST

Andorthy Kelly ’21 of New York, New York

The lines embedded in this snowy scene by the lights of Parker Hall and the path of Alumni Walk all point to a winning submission. But the creative caption really seals the deal.

A post shared by (@creepingcactus) on Dec 12, 2017 at 4:50pm PST

Morgan Leeson ’18 of Salem, Va.

This simple yet joyful photo of Morgan Leeson ’18, sitting under the tree as she enjoys her book surrounded by stacks of their neatly arranged brethren, highlights a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ message: We believe that knowledge is a gift we can give ourselves every day.

A post shared by (@morganeleeson) on Dec 15, 2017 at 1:59pm PST