Last semester, the Facebook page IC Compliments took over News Feeds during finals week with messages of appreciation, friendship and love. On Dec. 9 the anonymous page went live, and allowed for members of the community to send compliments in to be published under the IC Compliments name, allowing the complimentors to remain unknown to readers. For months the student behind the Facebook page remained a mystery. However, Online Editor Kacey Deamer sat down with the student who created the page, senior Perri Rumstein, who said she still can’t believe how quickly the page grew.
Kacey Deamer: You were the person behind IC Compliments, why don’t you tell me about starting it. What was the inspiration?
Perri Rumstein: I saw a couple of friends’ schools had it, and I was looking at it and thinking it would be a great thing for Ithaca. There are so many kind people here and so many nice things that happen on this campus every single day. It was finals time, which is particularly stressful, and I thought, “You know what, let’s do it. Let’s bring this page to life.” So it wasn’t an original idea on my part, but it was original to do it here.
KD: What was the campus reaction once the page was up and running on Facebook?
PR: Well, I had a couple of my friends help blast it out on Facebook. Within the first day it had 700 likes, which was crazy, and it’s exponentially shot up from there. Now it’s around 1,400 likes, which is a good population of the campus, and it got a lot of good buzz about it, which was good. It was funny, I would hear people talking about it and it would make me smile.
KD: Were there any messages that weren’t compliments?
PR: No, you’d be surprised. Everyone was just extremely nice, and I think that says a lot about our campus. It’s weird to get posts about yourself, that was a little interesting, and some of them were about friends, and it made me really happy to read. Overall everyone was really mature about it. I didn’t get anything that was mean or that could be taken the wrong way.
KD: What do you see as the future of IC Compliments?
PR: I will be graduating. I think if anyone else would pick it up and take it over, that’s something that they can do. It really has to be one person doing it, and it was a lot of stress. It was a big personal sacrifice, and I’m not sure I can make that sacrifice once more. But maybe I’ll release some compliments from time to time, because there are still a lot of messages, and I want people to know what’s being said about them. It was a really big undertaking, and I’m not sure I can do it again. But I hope someone else does or thinks about other ways to better the campus in different ways, like I did with this.
