The life of the average Boston University student is a balancing act. Between maintaining stellar grades, extracurricular activities and a social life, time is a scarce resource. Now add a Youtube channel with over 460 thousand subscribers to the mix.
This is a regular day for Ahmed Haidar, a BU junior studying data science, while he manages his channel RipandReelFishing.
“I started seeing [YouTube] shorts about the ocean, seas and people fishing … I thought, ‘Why don’t I try this out?’” Haidar said.
On RipandReelFishing, Haidar posts short-form content of clips found online about the deep sea often with the trending “Hoist the Colours” sea shanty in the background. He also creates videos about the North Sea, fishing around the world and his own local freshwater fishing.
“When I saw it blow up, I was like, ‘this is cool,’ but I knew I kinda just got lucky and it was growing a lot at the time, so I knew to stay consistent,” Haidar said.
Although Haidar credited luck for part of his success, his close friend and BU junior Evan Briatico told a different story.
“It’s dedication,” he said. “This success didn’t come overnight. It came after years of hard work.”
Haidar’s passion for fishing began as a child growing up in Weston, Mass.
“My dad taught me [how to fish] when I was pretty young,” Haidar said.
He didn’t immediately tell his family about his sudden surge towards YouTube stardom. In fact, he waited until after he reached 100,000 subscribers to reveal the news to his parents.
“They were impressed,” Haidar said. “They were like, ‘I wish you told me about this stuff sooner, but to me, it was just a side hobby.”
While working on his “side hobby,” Haidar doesn’t abandon his data science background, instead taking advantage of his knowledge of analytics and algorithms to attract viewers.
He uses YouTube’s Studio feature, which shows creators viewership data.
“Maybe someone stopped watching the video after two seconds because the hook wasn’t good enough,” he said. “So, on my next video, I’m going to be able to do something to improve on that topic … Analyzing that kind of data is very helpful.”
To manage his busy schedule, Haidar built an automated program that can create videos for him with data engineering. He explained that there are certain libraries in Python, a programming language, that are able to scrape the web for videos and download them to be posted later.
“Consistency allowed me to learn a lot,” he said. “As I stayed consistent with my work and my clubs and planning out the stuff I needed to do, things just became easier.”
When not working on his YouTube channel, Haidar is a computer tech lead for Engineers Without Borders USA, where he works directly with a school in Kenya to provide them with computers while also creating brochures to inform teachers on how to navigate the unfamiliar technology.
“They haven’t been exposed to tech for as long as we have, and I think it’s a privilege that we get to use laptops and do this stuff every day,” Haidar said.
BU junior Mazin Attia, who is also a member of Engineers Without Borders USA, has been close friends with Haidar since they met freshman year.
“He’s always open to helping,” Attia said. “He’s right now creating guides to help the students learn how to use the technology … He’s a very helpful and very motivated person.”
Haidar is also a chief marketing officer at Stock Trading BU, which he has been a part of since his freshman year.
Whether crafting new content for RipandReelFishing, creating brochures for Engineers Without Borders USA or going on adventures with friends, Haidar doesn’t seem to be slowing down in the near future.
He attributed the channel’s success to “never, never giving up.”
“If I stopped, or if I didn’t stay consistent, then [the channel’s growth] wouldn’t have happened,” Haidar said.
