Everyone who scrolls on TikTok knows Nikki Pindor. At least, everyone thinks they do. She’s a freshman who accidentally killed her dorm fish, cooked for frat boys just to watch the comments explode and posts viral, cringey “Get Ready With Me” videos.
She calls it trolling and her comment section calls it a train wreck. Either way, her strategy to get famous is working, and it might just be genius.
In just a month, Pindor went from “irrelevant” to unavoidable, the kind of campus celebrity who can’t leave her dorm room without ending up on YikYak, a social media app where users can make anonymous posts. And the kicker? She’s already making five figures a month while doing it.
“Song promos go for like $400,” Pindor said, shrugging. “Just for putting it in the background of a video.” Add brand deals, collabs and a manager she casually met at a house party, and suddenly she’s on her way to graduating debt-free.
How did Pindor troll her way to making $20k a month without losing her GPA or her mind?
Pindor didn’t wait long to test the waters. In her first week on campus, she was like any other freshman. By the second week, she was all over TikTok.
“I started posting general UMiami content,” Pindor explained. A TikTok about “Pancakes with Pat” got her on people’s Tik Tok For You pages immediately. Then came the infamous fish video. By the third week of classes, people were stopping her in the Mahoney-Pearson dorms for photos.
“I post controversial stuff once in a while,” Pindor said. “If I want to get an extra boost, I’ll post some ragebait. And those always work.”
She knows exactly when to stir things up, and it never fails.
“The frat cooking video was pure ragebait,” Pindor said. “I knew people would get mad, and it worked.” The clip showed her cooking alone in a frat house kitchen, sparking mixed reactions online from students who called it cringe and embarrassing. “Yes, I was there alone. Yes, that’s true. But like, I cooked for myself,” she said.
Then came another viral stunt. Pindor made it look like she was flashing her way into a club by lifting her shirt in front of bouncers in a TikTok video. But she really revealed another shirt she had underneath that read, “I heart bouncers.”
“Honestly, it was kind of a social experiment,” she said. “I wanted to see how bouncers would react — and it worked, I got in.”
But not everyone found it funny. The clip spread fast, earning her a meeting with the dean after someone reported it to the University.
“I got a bunch of backlash for that one,” Pindor said. “People thought I was actually flashing them.”
On YikYak, posts debated whether she’d crossed a line. Some posts defended her, others tore her apart. As always, she brushed it off and kept posting.
What makes Nikki so watchable isn’t just the chaos of her videos, it’s her stamina. She posts herself coming home at 5 a.m. on school nights and still making it to her 8 a.m. lectures. It’s not a one off either, she does this multiple times a week, leaving everyone wondering when she studies or sleeps.
Pindor’s schedule itself has become part of the spectacle: nights that stretch until sunrise, mornings in Cox, TikToks dropping every few hours and a flood of brand emails to answer between classes. Even her finances have become a subplot.
She’s already putting cash into index funds, bonds and bitcoin thanks to some investment advice she got from reddit.
While the money is good now, she isn’t betting her future on it.
“Obviously, I’m going to stick with school. Because anything on social media comes to an end,” Pindor said. “I need stability, so I’m going to stick with something I know will provide me with a stable career in the long term.”
That commitment aligns with her 4.85 high school GPA, seven advanced placement courses and top exam scores.
Pindor is chaotic, exhausting and undeniably impressive and maybe that’s why people can’t look away.
Pindor is pulling off what every UM student dreams of: steady paychecks, passing grades and a social life that never leaves South Beach. Of course, the same things that make her viral, also make her vulnerable.
Most of us can wander into the dining hall for a snack between classes and vanish into the crowd. Pindor can’t. If she steps inside, someone is bound to snap a picture.
“I literally put on sunglasses and tied my hair back once, just to get a cup of fruit,” Pindor said. “Six minutes later, I was on YikYak with the caption, ‘You can’t hide from us.’”
She’s good at laughing it off, but the attention can still feel suffocating.
“I feel self-conscious everywhere I go now,” Pindor said. She still appreciates the positive interactions. “I love when people are nice and come up – that’s nice, that’s fun. But sometimes they’re not.”
At a frat party, two girls shouted at her to get out. On YikYak, strangers speculate about her love life, even posting a blurry zoomed in photo of her walking with her manager and calling it a date.
“It wasn’t a date,” Pindor said, laughing. “I was literally going to a meeting.” Moments like that are constant reminders that being Nikki means living under a microscope.
Even wilder was the rumor that she’d been blacklisted from medical school.
“I’m like 99% sure I’m not actually blacklisted,” she said. “It was just a Yik Yak rumor. At first, I totally panicked but then some actual doctors messaged me like, ‘Girl, med schools don’t blacklist college freshmen unless you commit a crime or something.’”
Even so, the idea that real adults might be watching was a wake-up call.
“It’s kind of scary realizing that people on the medical board might be seeing my videos,” she admitted.
Pindor takes all of these negative comments in stride.
“Even if you’re the kindest person out there, you’re still gonna have to deal with rumors and hate. You just have to be mentally strong,” she said. “It comes with the platform.”
That strength is what carried Nikki through the chaos. The 5 a.m. nights, the YikYak rumors and constant eyes on her. It’s what makes her more impossible to scroll past. Whatever comes next, one thing is certain: everyone at UM will be watching.