Around eight years ago, Menlo alum Tyler Mitic ’24 asked his dad for a camera tripod. His dad promised the tripod on one condition: he had to film the family weekend trip. “Since then, I’ve totally been obsessed with filming,” Mitic said. Mitic spent the past summer traveling with his girlfriend through Europe and California, ending the two-month-long trip with six terabytes of footage, equal to around 1,000 hours of high definition (HD) video. “At 70 years old, I can go back and look through all that. That’s so magical to me, I can see what we were saying in that hour-long recording of us sitting in the tent.”
For the past two years, Mitic has posted consistently on his Instagram, YouTube and TikTok social media channels, capturing the excitement of his travels. “Where do you want to go?” “Why not everywhere?” These two opening lines lead into a 23-second montage of Mitic’s adventures. This video garnered more than seven million likes on Instagram, flashing through his travels from the California coast to the Dolomites in Italy to the Swiss Alps.
“There’s a school Tyler. There’s the adventure Tyler, and there’s also the business and the entrepreneurial Tyler,” Mitic said. His Instagram account, filled with professionally filmed and edited videos, has 49.5 thousand followers and is stamped with a verification mark. Yet, as Mitic explains, he is a traveler, content producer and student at Claremont McKenna College. “I get to embrace two completely different worlds in my life,” Mitic said. “I have friends at college that are more on the academic side and challenge me intellectually […] and then I have a friend group of travelers and social media nomads with a great background in nature.”
Mitic attributes his success on social media to his spontaneity. “My best travel buddy’s name is Charlie. I met him two years ago in a Santa Barbara parking lot,” Mitic said. Mitic and Charlie Kernkamp bought a sailboat off of Facebook Marketplace with zero sailing knowledge. They not only successfully repaired the boat and engine, but also successfully sailed it through the Catalina Islands and up to Santa Barbara. “I got a little bit of [a] following from that. Then it kind of started to snowball,” Mitic said.
Mitic uses social media as a creative outlet. “By creating videos online of beautiful places, it encourages me to go to more beautiful places.” Yet capturing these places and moments can be complex. “The reality is, yes, so much of this is quote unquote ‘staged,’” Mitic said. “It’s a wide range of what’s actually happening behind the scenes. But there’s always authentic joy. There’s always authentic happiness. There’s also limited space on the SD cards.”
While Mitic partly credits his adventurous and entrepreneurial skills to Menlo, he pushed himself in other areas throughout high school. “I was there during the day, and then I was kind of non-existent. I didn’t really like any parties. After school or on the weekends I was out adventuring, and many times filming it,” Mitic said.
He struggled with dyslexia throughout his time at Menlo, and as a result, always forged his own path. “I think there’s a lot of value in not always going on the route that’s been charted out,” Mitic said. He acknowledges how difficult that can be at Menlo, but he encourages students to put the pressure to conform aside and do what they love. “The cliché answer is the blanket answer: follow your passions.”
Mitic’s favorite adventure spot near Menlo is the stretch of Route One north of Santa Cruz and south of Half Moon Bay. “That is an incredibly undiscovered and beautiful area that is shockingly close to Menlo,” Mitic said. If you are able, Mitic recommends driving this specific stretch of highway — finding a spot to camp for the night, but with no need for a strict plan. “There’s so much fear that comes from the unknown […] and social media especially overemphasizes the ‘oh my God, I have to see this, I have to have all these things planned,’ but in reality it’s the people you go with,” he said.
