Student Spotlight: Evan Buffelen – Rise to Internet Fame

Student+Spotlight%3A+Evan+Buffelen+-+Rise+to+Internet+Fame

Stella Barry and Reese Brawley

We have a celebrity in our midst.

Evan Buffelen is a senior here at Tahoma high school who has a very successful YouTube channel on top of being an AP Scholar.

It’s uncommon to see kids, especially high school students rise to internet fame as quickly as Evan has.

Most would flaunt their success and take advantage of it, but Evan is the complete opposite, always being humble and grateful for his hard-earned lifestyle.

For some background, Evan Buffelen is 17 years old and has been making youtube videos for about four and a half years.

His channel is mostly long term documentaries/story style content based in the game of Minecraft.

Evan doesn’t just take his job lightly, he continues to put extensive effort into all his videos.

He says “it usually takes around 200 to 500 hours of work to complete” a video.

So he tries to work 20-40 hours during a regular school week.

With his YouTube channel taking up so much of his free time, he tries to also prioritize school work, more specifically his multiple AP classes.

Evan has maintained a 4.0 GPA since 6th grade and for a while tried to take as many AP classes as possible.

Along with his accomplishment of being a YouTuber, Evan has also become an AP Scholar, scoring high on AP Exams.

He says that “part of why I’ve made it on the AP Scholar poster is because I took five AP classes during my first 2 years, but YouTube hadn’t blown up yet so I was still taking as difficult of a course load as I could reasonably take.”

Since then, Evan has still chosen to take difficult classes, but still makes sure the homework load doesn’t interfere with his ability to create YouTube videos.

He mentions that “it is definitely a lot of work, and I rarely have much free time.”

However, he’s not very upset about it as he gets more fulfillment from working.

A large workload has led to many periods of burnout or little motivation, but Evan always manages to get through the tough patches.

So although it may get stressful at times, Evan tells us that “sometimes I may have doubts about a decision I’m making or a part of a video, but I wouldn’t trade it for something easier.

It’s also more motivating to set my own goals and deadlines as opposed to someone looking over my shoulder telling me to get something done.”

Through his ability to push through and produce quality content, Evan recently reached 1 million subscribers on YouTube.

He says that “honestly when I started YouTube, I never expected to hit 1 million subscribers, reason 100,000. It really is difficult to explain how it feels, other than it still doesn’t feel real.”

Although he’s not 100% sure what he wants to do after high school, he knows that his true passion lies in film and cinematography.

Even with his uncertainty, Evan states that “I love what I do and I’m insanely lucky that I have an opportunity like I do now.

And I will never take that for granted.

Whatever my future holds, I hope it allows me to express my creativity, and make something that I can look back on decades down the line and be proud of.”

 

Make sure you go check out Evan’s YouTube channel by following this link!

https://www.youtube.com/@EvanMCGaming/featured