This is the 131st article in Bears Doing Big Things, a monthly column celebrating the stories of notable M-A alumni.
Cyprien Boustiha ’20, known to his two million TikTok followers as @cyp, has turned his unique cultural upbringing into content.
Boustiha was born in Menlo Park to a French mother and French-Algerian father, both of whom worked as French teachers at the multi-language Silicon Valley International School (INTL) on Willow Road. He attended INTL for elementary and middle school before going to M-A.
His childhood was marked by his experiences playing soccer at Palo Alto Soccer Club and spending time with friends around Menlo Park. “I used to go hang out [in] downtown Menlo Park. I was not outside like that with people from the area, because my school [was] a private school and a bunch of people came from Mountain View and wherever,” Boustiha said.
Boustiha appreciated INTL’s smaller, French-centered culture. “My school [was] honestly only French. I had one English class where it was just learning English literature, but I had French math, European geography, European history,” he said. “Also, my school [was] like 30 kids in my grade.”
Because of SVIS’s small nature, Boustiha describes his transition to M-A as shocking. “M-A’s big as hell, so it was definitely a culture shock on many different occasions. I was also super sheltered until M-A,” he said. “But it was honestly for the better, though. I definitely needed that experience because being in a sheltered [environment], I think the worst thing that ever happened was someone kissing someone else. And then, ooh, get to M-A, and it was like, oh my, this is real.”
M-A also brought Boustiha away from his French-centered upbringing and closer to American popular culture. “I spoke English, but I didn’t have the American culture,” he said. “I guess I didn’t even know the slang. And the music too. I started listening to rap when I got to M-A. [I grew up with] mostly French culture. I did watch Nickelodeon and stuff like that, but I would watch French shows, do French things.”
At M-A, Boustiha spent his time studying and playing soccer. In his senior year, he was a captain of the varsity soccer team. Boustiha’s favorite classes at M-A included AP Computer Science with Cindy Donaldson, AP Calculus with Kristen Bryan, and Precalculus with Tomiko Fronk, his favorite teacher. “Ms. Fronk, though. Top tier, like really top tier. She just felt relatable, and she knew how to be serious in class, but also, outside of school hours, it was super chill, and she would sit down and tell us about what she had going on,” he said.
Boustiha was introduced to TikTok at the beginning of his senior year by Bianca Johnston, another student at M-A who had gone viral. “It was kind of like, ‘Oh, she has so many followers, so cool,’ and everyone was talking about it. [Some people] kind of hated on it, but I was like, ‘Wait, I watch TikTok.’”
After contemplating whether or not to start posting, Boustiha decided to start his TikTok on a whim. “I just made one late at night. I was like, if it blows up, it blows up. If it doesn’t, I’m gonna just delete it in the morning. And then I was just super lucky. I just woke up and had a hundred thousand views on it,” he said. “And then I continued, and the next few also blew up, and I was just like, ‘I’m just gonna ride this wave.’”
However, Bousitha struggled with others’ opinions of his TikToks at first. “It was at the period in time where I had to hide TikTok on my phone, it was embarrassing. It was a little bit before COVID, so it wasn’t full quarantine,” he said.
Boustiha saw TikTok as a way to evolve past his run-of-the-mill high school experience. “I felt kind of just like an average student. Like, I had good grades, and I played varsity soccer, but it was just like, what’s next? What’s something cool? And I was like, ‘That’s pretty cool,’” he said.
However, his turn to social media came with some pushback. His TikTok virality caused rifts in some of his friendships and caused awkward moments with teachers. “It filtered hella of my friends out because all of my friends were not messing with the TikTok stuff at all. Especially in the early days, they were like, ‘That’s so gay.’ But I filtered all the extra people out, and it was good,” he said. “Some of the teachers did see me, though. Like, some of the teachers were like, ‘My daughter showed me your profile.’”
Boustiha’s rise on TikTok was cut short by COVID, which shut down the school just months after Boustiha started posting. He describes the shutdown as both a blessing and a curse. It isolated him from the M-A community, but also allowed him to focus on posting. “It was kind of like damn, we’re not going to school anymore, and everything is kind of on pause, but I’m making TikToks in my room, and it was doing good. I felt a little sad, though, that I didn’t get proper goodbyes,” he said.
Boustiha initially thought about playing Division III soccer after graduation, but ultimately decided to go to HEC Montreal, a public business school in Canada. However, instead of immediately attending college after graduating from M-A, Boustiha took a gap year and moved to Los Angeles to focus on social media. “I wanted to move to L.A. Like, this is where the money’s at. And L.A. didn’t give a damn about COVID. It was the Hype House era and the Sway House era. And so I wanted to go over there,” he said. “I ended up joining a content house too. It was called The Vault.”
Though the time in L.A. was formative for his career, it didn’t allow Boustiha to thrive socially.
“I was like freshly 18, and also 19 at that time, and it was like a big mansion on Melrose. Literally no adult supervision, parties, TikTokers, all that. It was cool, but it was very distracting,” he said. “I also felt like I didn’t make that many friends and wasn’t being productive. Like, what is there even to do apart from making videos? I didn’t feel like I had a purpose.”
Eventually, Boustiha decided to leave L.A. and focus on his studies at HEC Montreal.
Boustiha spent the next three years in Montreal, getting a BAA in Business Intelligence. In college he posted less frequently, until a trip to Algeria ignited his desire to post more regularly. “At the end of my college experience, one of my really good friends is Algerian, and my dad’s actually Algerian. So he took me to Algeria, and I went and rediscovered my family through LinkedIn. One of them sent me a message, they were like, ‘We have the same last name. I think we might be part of the same family,’” he said.
“So I went back to Algeria with my friend, and I called them up, and I was like, ‘I think I’m part of your family.’ And I documented that whole thing because I was like, I mean, I know how to make social media videos, and I thought it would be cool to just share it. And so that did super well.”
From there, Boustiha realized that his blend of French, Algerian, and American perspectives made him a unique social media personality. “I knew how to make the social media thing work, and I thought I should just make it based off of who I am. And so that’s my differentiator since I’m French, American, Algerian. I speak two languages.”
After graduating from college, Boustiha chose to move to Paris in January 2026 and switch his content to being almost exclusively in French. Specifically, a majority of Boustiha’s content focuses on educating French people on the differences between French and American society.
“I was like, I’m gonna be the American in France—the reference for French people for what America is, pretty much,” Boustiha said. “Hella French people love Americans.”
The pivot to French language content, though risky, has been well received. “From one day to the next, boom, all my videos are in French. But the thing is, my followers already kind of knew that I was speaking or that I was French-American, because I had mentioned it before. So it was a shock for some, but most were like, we’re with it,” he said. “The content’s been popping off.”
Content creation has been part of Boustiha’s life since 2019, a much longer amount of time than most social media influencers. This extended career has meant that Boustiha’s posting style has evolved tremendously. “There was the e-boy phase. There was all that. I’ve been on TikTok for like six years now. So I did it all. I promise you, the POVs, the dances. I did all that,” he said. “Whatever people are watching, I had to do.”
Now, Boustiha is in his own element. “Even though I don’t really know many people over here, I’ll be like, I wanna do this, let me go record it. I don’t really care about people looking. I feel like just the years of doing social media, not really caring about what other people around me think, and also knowing how to make the videos made it really successful,” he said.
Boustiha’s advice to current M-A students: “Americans have to realize we’re living in like a show. The high school, American life: locker rooms, the passing periods. All that is so surreal to everyone else in the world. So just enjoy it. And don’t take it too seriously. I promise you, if you are not doing so good in high school or whatever, it’s not the end of the road.”
Boustiha’s advice to those interested in social media: “Be consistent and be different. When I started social media [compared to] right now, it’s so different. You could’ve just been good-looking and do lip sync videos, and it’ll happen for you, and you’ll get hundreds of thousands [of views] and be the Charli. But now there’s so many people that want to make content and so many people that are trying to blow up on social media, you really have to come different. Two to three videos a day. Reinvent yourself. And be outgoing. Like, be yourself. Especially with everyone who are portraying AI stuff, if you’re yourself, AI can’t recreate that.”
