Social Media Star, Milad Mirg, Explains His NJIT Connections and Work Ethic

Milad Mirghahari, a social media influencer known publicly as Milad Mirg, has more than six million followers each on TikTok and YouTube and is a first-generation NJIT student, Albert Dorman Honors College member and computer science major.

Just like NASA astronaut Wally Schirra and Chicago Cubs pitcher Mark Leiter Jr., Mirghahari took skills honed in Newark and excelled in public. He is known not for orbiting the planet or throwing baseballs, but for making short videos that depict him trying different jobs, usually in the restaurant or retail fields.

Mirghahari, his brother and a friend started making videos before he even turned 10. At 12, he discovered a mobile application called iFunny, where he shared humorous Amazon reviews and became the app’s fourth-most followed user. “That was the first take of virality that I ever saw,” he explained. At age 14, he moved to Vine, gaining half a million followers who enjoyed his SpongeBob SquarePants clips. He didn’t think he had what it takes to succeed on YouTube.

In high school, Mirghahari worked nights and weekends at his parents’ Subway franchise. He opened TikTok and YouTube accounts, where he reached new heights of Internet virality by sharing funny and unusual stories about his customers. He continued working there after joining NJIT in 2018, following in two older brothers’ footsteps as a Highlander.

Mirghahari enjoyed coding and transferred into the honors college after his first semester here. But his real passion is to work hard on his own projects. That’s why as a freshman, he sought permission to take CS-485, Foundations of Technology Entrepreneurship, with Senior University Lecturer Suresh Kumar. He said the overall NJIT experience, and also the experience of developing a startup company in that class with additional support from the university’s VentureLink incubator, taught him a lesson more valuable than any individual technical skill: that he’s capable of accomplishing hard things. “If [you’re] willing to just commit the time to it, I think you can do anything,” he said.

He has two courses left to finish before officially earning a degree, but for now Mirghahari has put school on hold to focus full-time on producing videos. His most popular YouTube video, “When you’re $0.01 short,” has 13 million views. “Mother of all Karens” and “Customer almost made her cry” each have 11 million views. “Ma’am, this is a Subway” reached 8.9 million. There are dozens more, most running just a couple of minutes. It’s the same on his TikTok channel, where a 1:26-minute video about foot-long cookies reached almost 10 million views.

“My parents thought I was absolutely crazy. And it literally did not register to them,” Mirghahari said. He said they’d tell him it was nice to hear the statistics from him, but that their views changed when they started hearing it from customers. “The moment that they actually started to get it was, we would have every single day at least 25 to 30 people coming into the store, my mom worked there, and they would just tell her your son’s huge, your son’s doing incredible stuff. It took real people coming into the Subway and telling her, for her to think, ‘Oh my god, something’s going on.’”

“I really did enjoy the job at Subway but it got to a point where I couldn't do my job at YouTube because of the people coming in. It was very hard to balance both,” explained Mirghahari. His paths merged again when the Subway corporation signed him up for a pair of marketing deals. Now, his videos focus on him trying different jobs and other customer service tales.

@miladmirg

footlong cookies before gta 6 is crazy

♬ original sound - Milad

“I think a lot of it was sort of like a perfect storm during COVID. I think people needed something like that, if that makes sense. Everybody was kind of isolated in their home. There wasn't a lot of outside interaction,” he said. He believes that viewers found comfort in seeing a friendly face at a familiar restaurant, telling stories that were otherwise lost during the pandemic.

Looking forward, “It would be really cool to still be able to do YouTube. That's my ultimate goal. This could be a sustainable career over the next 10 years. It would be really cool to build business on top of this as well,” likely starting with brand partnerships, he said. He’s already produced videos with skateboarding legend Tony Hawk, NFL running back Marshawn Lynch and one of the biggest YouTubers of all, James Donaldson, known online as MrBeast.

Mirghahari’s advice to fellow Highlanders is to find their own style but to work hard, whether it’s for a course, hobby, job or anything else — you can’t coast through college with a plan to not work hard until later, because then you won’t know how, he believes.

“I truly believe how you do anything is how you do everything. And I know there's a lot of people that disagree with that. But I think while you're there, you have to just put in your all, or else you're kind of training yourself to think the bare minimum is okay. And that's going to translate to other parts of your life. The most rewarding thing when I was at NJIT was trying to get A’s in every single one of my classes.”

His favorite professor, Kumar, is proud of Mirghahari’s work ethic. "The extraordinary success achieved by Milad proves the effectiveness of the learning strategy of infusing more applied courses into the curriculum, that forces students to get outside their comfort zone and into the real world,” Kumar stated. “This is where deep learning and a change in mindset happens. Combine this with non-traditional faculty who are steeped in the world of practice, small class sizes, engaging external mentors, and additional resources to attend events and conferences — we get to the secret sauce that has resulted in Milad.”