Travis Schmauss, a junior, sits in the kitchen of his North Calvert Street apartment, blasting electronic music from his speakers.
“I need this music to stay up at night,” Schmauss said.
As the founder of JHU Snaps, a popular Facebook page that posts comedic Snapchats from around the Hopkins community, Schmauss keeps busy reviewing all the daily submissions, which sometimes exceed 1,000 snapchats.
Despite all the work involved with keeping up the page, Schmauss said he has fun in every aspect of his life, including his work as a writer for The Black and Blue Jay, the vice social chair and DJ for Phi Delta Theta fraternity and his participation in the Johns Hopkins Wading Team, which he also helped found.
The Johns Hopkins Wading Team is a comedic team of “waders” who “compete” against other collegiate wading teams by sitting in kiddie pools and hanging out. The Hopkins group members calls themselves the Sea Cucumbers.
Schmauss said that his parents had a strong influence on his liberal, fun-loving lifestyle. A California native, Schmauss talked about how his parents molded his personality.
“They were very liberal in my upbringing,” Schmauss said. “They never forced academics on me... I have no traditional conservative values to me socially. My parents are seriously socially out there. My dad will talk to anyone. He does this thing where he gets into an elevator, and if there’s multiple people, he’ll turn around and face the people and he says, ‘I suppose you’re wondering why I gathered you all here today.’”
Despite all of his fun endeavors, Schmauss works hard in his courses as a materials science and engineering major. He believes that the field of materials science itself is fascinating and broad.
“I’ve always really liked this kind of science that I couldn’t really put my finger on,” Schmauss said. “And that was because I really didn’t know that materials science was a field in itself. I took three intro classes [my freshman year]... and the only one that I actually could bear was the materials class.”
Schmauss has also combined his love of science with his passion for fun in his professional pursuits. The summer after freshman year, he interned for the show TV show Cosmos, hosted by astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson.
“I just did film and media clearances for them,” Schmauss said. “So nature scenes. I would [search] across the internet using all sorts of these industry pay sites, wade through hundreds of hours of whales, and select the clip of whales that really touched me. And they would use my whales that I selected in a show... As far as I know, all the things I selected are in the show. The not awesome part is that I have not watched the show.”
Despite his work in TV, Schmauss admitted he has an inherent inability to understand common references from media.
“[I] don’t understand film and media references,” Schmauss said. “Living with [my roommate] freshman year, when that was his major, he was all about it... I guess normal humans will talk to each other and will often reference the things they like. A lot of the times I’ll just laugh along with it... But as people get to know me, they realize that I do that every single time... and so [my roommate] was just kind of like, ‘You really have no clue.’ And I was like, ‘You know, yeah.’”
