Undergraduate Students’ Perceptions of Social Media’s Impact on Academic Career and Personal Life: A Study from Koraput District, Odisha

Social media has become an inseparable part of the everyday life of undergraduate (UG) students, shaping the way they learn, communicate and spend their free time. The present study examines how UG students at Vikram Dev University, Jeypore, in the Koraput district of Odisha perceive the influence of social media on their academic career and personal life. A descriptive cross-sectional survey design was adopted, and sixty students were selected through purposive sampling from among those with prior experience of using social media. Data were gathered through a structured questionnaire administered via Google Forms and analysed using descriptive statistics. The findings show that YouTube and WhatsApp are the most frequently used platforms, and that a majority of the respondents spend between two and four hours daily on social media, mostly during the evening. While eighty per cent of the students consider social media the easiest way of learning and sixty-three per cent view it as a substitute for books, seventy-five per cent also believe it has a negative effect on health, and sixty per cent feel it disconnects them from the real world. The study highlights the dual nature of social media in the lives of students from a semi-rural, tribal-dominated region and calls for structured digital literacy initiatives, sensible time-management guidance and school-level interventions that can help students use these platforms more purposefully for their academic growth.