Editor’s note: Images in this entry have been removed due to cease and desist order from Andres Rodriguez. We apologize for any inconvenience and for more information, visit KYM Forum Thread – Office of Cease & Desist Records.
About
Sheltered College Freshman is an advice animal image macro series featuring a stock photo of a young woman posing with a blue notepad in what appears to be a library. The images are captioned with ignorant statements often related to naive understandings of sexual innuendo and slang related to illegal drugs. The character serves as the female counterpart to the College Freshman series.
Origin
The original image comes from a stock photo by photographer Andres Rodriguez titled “students in a library” on iStockphoto.[1] The first Quickmeme[2] submission with the caption “‘You girls wanna go to a party?’ / Aww that’s so thoughtful of you to invite us!” was created on September 5th, 2011.
Spread
The earliest known Reddit thread appeared in the /r/adviceanimals[3] subreddit on September 5th, 2011, featuring an image with the caption “‘Whoo, thirsty Thursday!’ / whips out Brita filter.” A compilation of Sheltered College Freshman images were posted to BuzzFeed[4] on September 15th. The following day, the web culture blog UpRoxx[5] published a slideshow of the series. Additional derivatives have since spread to Tumblr under the tag “#sheltered college freshman”.[6]
Identity
On January 8th, 2012, Redditor InternetDetective321 posted a thread[7] identifying the model in the stock photo as Kerin Portillo. The Twitter account @KERINP[8] lists Bogotá, Colombia as her location and her portfolio can be found on Jalbum.net.[9]
Derivative: Sheltered No More
On January 20th, 2012, Redditor xr71bb submitted an image macro to the /r/adviceanimals[10] subreddit featuring a photo of Kerin Portillo accompanied by the caption “I think you are cute too / my rate is $600 per hour or $2,500 for the night.” The thread reached the front page and accumulated over 4,000 up votes within 48 hours. The “Sheltered No More” Quickmeme[11] page subsequently received over 120 submissions in the next 3 days, with many of the images setup as an inverse version of “Sheltered College Freshman” portraying the woman as a prostitute or sexually promiscuous gold digger.
Search Interest
Search queries for “sheltered college freshman” picked up in September of 2011, the same month the Quickmeme page was created.
External References
[1]iStockphoto – students in a library
[2]Quickmeme – Sheltered College Freshman
[3]Reddit – Introducing Sheltered College Freshman
[4]BuzzFeed – The Best of the Sheltered College Freshman Meme
[5]UpRoxx – Sheltered College Freshman
[6]Tumblr – #sheltered college freshman
[7]Reddit – Found! The real identity of Sheltered College Freshman. Her name is Kerin Portillo and she is from Bogotá, Colombia.
[9]Jalbum – Kerin Portillo
[10]Reddit – Sheltered no more
[11]Quickmeme – Sheltered no more
[12]Reddit – Found: Motherlode of Sheltered College Freshman pics.