The eighth of October marked an important day in my college career. That Sunday was the day I premiered my radio show on 91.7 WLFR, Stockton University’s radio station. This is a long-term event however, so I will talk solely about the first day of being on air and my training. Overall, this organization has had a positive impact on my college career and has shown me the real-life implementation of the theory I am learning in my communication major classes. I went into this experience with incredibly high hopes and then was able to do exactly what I wanted, for the most part, creating an almost completely positive experience. The only negative emotions derived from this experience were that I could not dive as deep into this event as I wanted to.
The training for this job was honestly the worst part of the entire ordeal, but was entirely necessary. It consisted of two shadowing opportunities and two board training sessions, all of which lasted approximately two hours. I got to shadow two veteran disc jockeys, Ken and Matt. Both taught me different styles of mixing music and remaining engaging to the audience on air. They also taught me how to mark time and sign setlist sheets that are necessary to catalog the music that I play and the frequency readings of the radio tower. During my time with Matt specifically, we interviewed a local country artist. This gave me the confidence to ask questions during interviews as well as teach me the proper procedure for conducting interviews on my own. The sound board training refers to learning how to mix music on different channels to create a decently paced radio show that sounds passable. This was incredibly boring and difficult for me, considering I was not able to put my own musical stylings into my performance and was constantly nitpicked over tiny mistakes. I also realize the necessity of this and my own need for humility as I learned everything I know, other than music preference, from these short meetings. Arguably, my two shadowing opportunities taught me a great deal about on-air style while the sound board training exercises taught me the technique.
On October 8th, I arrived an hour early for my show, shaking like a leaf. The first step to performing is filling out the papers that are going to be used throughout the show and picking from hundreds of discs to create a setlist for the show. My show, Indie Wave, focuses primarily on indie pop music and vaporwave creating a dreamy tone that goes well with the 10 p.m. to midnight time slot. I also prepared a list of public service announcements, statements to support local and national movements for the sake of charity and warnings. After I had two hours’ worth of content, I plugged my headphones into the soundboard and spent two hours playing music and back announcing the tracks I had played as well as short anecdotes. My experience was amazing and even at midnight I was ready to keep going for hours. Not only was this a medium for me to express my own brand of creativity, it also taught me the technical aspects of running a radio show and being responsible for keeping track of what I did within that show.
My show continues and I take advantage of this opportunity by learning every day from the people at WLFR how to be a better announcer and how to better select tracks. As a communication major, the radio station is an incredible hybrid of work and training that will one day help me get a job in the field of broadcasting.