Bored one day during Spring Break, a couple of North Carolina A&T State University students took to the popular social media site, Twitter, in search of something to do.

“My friend Brandon Hawkins suggested the idea and I began randomly Tweeting A&T students to my followers and it just grew,” Randen Green said.

#AGGIETRAIN is the hashtag used on Twitter. When a hashtag is a part of a message or a Tweet, it allows people who are Tweeting about the same subject to engage in conversation with each other. If enough people engage in that conversation, then it can be recognized as one of the most talked about subjects in the region, the country and worldwide.

Green, 19, is a rising junior and graphics communications major. On the first day, there was modest participation but by the second day, it caught on like wildfire.

“From there I needed more help so I went out and found more,” Green said.

To help, Green called on friends James Oliver, Damon Sincere Jones-Way, Kashawn Omar McRavion-Little, Trever Fluellen, Xavier Shaw, Joshua Williams and Quencey Barton. The group is now known as the #AGGIETRAIN Conductors.

The conductors use the hashtag by putting the names of people affiliated with A&T in a message and send it out with the #AGGIETRAIN hashtag for others to see. The idea is for all of the people who see these messages to follow each other so that they may share information.

Though #AGGIETRAIN started as something that happened on consecutive days, the conductors have decided to make it less frequent so nobody burns out on it.

“We just sat down and decided that it needed to happen at the same time every month and I just threw out a random day,” Barton said. “Now, it happens the first Friday of every month during the academic school year.”

Initially, #AGGIETRAIN started as a way for the students to gain more followers but it has evolved into something more.

“It is a great interactive social networking opportunity that is perfect for current and incoming freshman Aggies,” Jones-Way said. “When there are events happening on campus, someone can easily ask what there is to do and not only can the #AggieTrain conductors answer the question but other Aggie followers that they’ve gained from the #AggieTrain will answer.”

Green agrees.

“It can be something like wanting to find out more information about a teacher or a class or even people trying to sell their books to people who need them,” Green said. “It really helps.”

While helping fellow Aggies has become the goal, there are still those who join in just to increase their number of followers, and that, Oliver says, has been the biggest challenge.

“Some people will take the followers and won't bother to get to know anybody,” Oliver said. “That’s why we encourage and stress the true purpose of the #AggieTrain every month to make sure we all get to know each other.”

Though a lot of the students live on campus, they haven’t had many chances to connect with each other in this way until #AGGIETRAIN.

“To be honest, they probably would have found each other – eventually - but it would have taken a lot longer,” Williams said. “With twitter and the #AGGIETRAIN it takes a couple of days, if that.”

The last #AGGIETRAIN event for the school year was May 4 and has been the biggest to date. The eight conductors, their followers and the university all boarded the #AGGIETRAIN at 9:15 p.m., May 5, and had a part in having the hashtag become the No. 1 trending topic in Greensboro, the United States and worldwide – at the same time.

“It took us five minutes to do this,” Fluellen said. “What surprised me most was how quickly and efficiently my fellow Aggies began participating with the #AggieTrain and getting the word out to their friends and classmates.”

Now that the semester is over, the conductors are looking ahead to next semester. The next #AGGIETRAIN will be on Aug. 17, the Friday before the first week of classes to get all the freshmen on board.

“We want to get more Aggies connected and give them a chance to reach out to other Aggie Family members,” McRavion-Little said. “We want this to keep growing so the whole world knows who we are.”

Shaw agrees.

“The #AGGIETRAIN on Twitter is just a start for us to move on to bigger things,” Shaw said. “The biggest thing is we want to be recognized as a great school. #AGGIETRAIN will help us get our name out there to show that.”