During the academic year 2018-2019, I worked on a student-led, open-access college podcast series titled “Finding Your Place.” The purpose of this podcast is to help first-year students navigate the struggles and challenges of college through the narration of upperclassmen’s stories. It was created with the support of Minnesota State University’s grant funding for innovation in higher education, Shark Tank. It is, also, an extension of the Dreaming by Degrees project, “a multimedia documentary project created to explore the hopes, dreams, fears, and challenges of current, incoming college students.” Our production team consisted of six student producers- juniors and seniors- from Century College and Minnesota State University Mankato: Emily Albright, Sontiana Brandts, Monte Brown, Tanita Cronk, Marko Milosevic, and myself. We worked under the direction of two faculty producers, Dr. David Engen and Dr. Robert Jersak, Communication Studies professors at Century College and MSU Mankato.

 

Working on this project allowed me to meet Levels 3 & 4 of the Information Literacy section in the Research competency, because it helped me develop the ability to evaluate and incorporate selected information into a knowledge base. I did this by listening to our student-producers’ initial recordings and identifying the clips that would be fitting for our episodes based on their content. I used this information effectively and ethically by making sure that the student producers only turned in recordings they were comfortable with including on the podcast. I, also, made sure that the additional people interviewed for this podcast signed a media release form prior to completing their interviews. This ensured that they were aware of the purpose of our recordings and granted us legal access to the use of this material. Besides increasing my knowledge and understanding of Information Literacy, my involvement with this project also allowed me to meet Levels 1-4 of the Information Synthesis section in the Research competency. I completed this by organizing and integrating our student-producers’ ideas, stories, and voices into each of our episodes. This ensured that everyone’s input was taken into consideration and different perspectives were included in our episodes. This variety of voices included our student-producers who came from different backgrounds (i.e. veteran, non-traditional students, person of color, disabled). It, also, included people outside of our producing team with equally important stories such as family members, academic professionals, and public figures. Although we began this project with a rough idea of the topics we wanted to address in this podcast, it shifted its focus as we began our recordings and discovered new topics with untapped potential.

 

Being part of this podcast required a lot of time commitment and vulnerability from me as I was, both, one of the voices and producers of this project. Still, it taught me valuable skills about audio recording and producing and about the complex process that comes with conducting a creative research project (i.e writing a project proposal, obtaining funding, forming a team, developing a plan of action). Although I didn’t participate in all the behind-the-scenes activities of this project, it gave me an insider’s perspective on this process, which will be a valuable guide when conducting my own creative project in the future. 

 

Below is a the link to our podcast on SoundCloud (also available on iTunes).