After a while, memories of college tend to be more nostalgic than educational. Especially for someone like myself who graduated over a score ago, most of what I specifically learned in the classroom in my coursework is a faded memory. But college is so much more than the courses you take and the grades you get. The life experiences, formal and informal, tend to stay with us for a long time, as college tends to be the place where we first invent or reinvent ourselves.

When I found out in a roundabout way that my college radio station, WNEK-FM in Springfield, Massachusetts, went off the air as a broadcast station and became a purely Internet streaming station, it made me sad. Thinking about my 4 years at Western New England College, the school that held and later dropped the broadcast license, I realized I learned more within the walls of the radio station than I did in any classroom.

Of course I Iearned much in my coursework at the school better known by its acronym, WNEC. But it was my involvement in its college radio station that not only served as a true training ground for me, but offered me challenges and opportunities I couldn’t have possibly got from any professor in any class.

It’s hard to summarize my total college radio station experience in one post of reasonable length, so here’s highlights of what my radio broadcast days taught me.

Leading vs. Managing … Your Friends No Less – In addition to being a broadcast station, my college radio station was the largest, most-active club on campus, with well-over 75 students, faculty and staff between on-air DJs and off-air support. This is where I cut my teeth for the first time in a leadership role, having to lead, encourage, manage and discipline station members, many who were my friends. Sometimes lines were crossed and I had to take unpopular stands my senior year when I was the station’s General Manager, not their friend Mike. What I learned here I took into managing my first post-graduation work projects and teams.

Surround Yourself with the Right People – Within such a large club, there was a smaller core number of people whom I considered confidants in helping me effectively run WNEK-FM. Some were board members holding other roles such as program director, music director, etc., and others were DJ’s and off-the-mic support. They helped me think through tough decisions, and their points of view were invaluable to me.

This group that surrounded me was not a finite group that never changed. Over the years, students would come and go, and new people would join and, over time, become trusted advisors. As much as I had a good group, I was always looking to see who else could contribute, a task all leaders should be doing.

True Cultural Diversity – Most people who were involved in the radio station were there with common interests, namely music and broadcasting, and as you could guess these interests crossed all races, creeds, colors, sexual orientations, economic backgrounds, geographies, et. al. As a result we had the most diverse student organization on campus.

For someone like myself who grew up in a predominantly white, Christian, middle-class town, looking back I didn’t really think about it at the time; these people were simply my friends. I learned not to judge someone by what they looked like – the person with the mohawk and black leather was no different than the one in polo shirts and khakis. As I grew and entered the real world, I cherished I was exposed to and learned to appreciate this diversity.

Do Your Homework – It may not come as a surprise that someone as myself, who has worked in technology my entire career, spent most of my academic time in the computer lab. But here I am not talking about my computer class homework, rather the homework needed to be the best DJ and broadcaster.

I learned this the hard way when I interviewed Civil Rights leader Julian Bond who was speaking on campus. Back then there was no Web to lookup his Wikipedia profile (in case you’re curious, the concept of the Web wasn’t published until my senior year in college), but I didn’t even walk over to the library to look up something on him or get more information from our school’s PR department who arranged the interview for me. This was clear when I opened the interview with Bond saying he is a current Georgia state senator to which he quickly corrected me. Needless to say, I did a facepalm in my mind, then sucked it up and continued the interview.

Networking Early and Often – Networking for me started small, and as I saw others reaching out to me I did my own outreach and found many win-win situations.

An alumni of the radio station and college came back and asked me if he could be substitute DJ, which many alumni who lived near campus did. Over the course of the year I offered him a few shows when others couldn’t make their own. When I heard a certain New York City developer was going to be at a local game manufacturer for the launch of an eponymous board game, knowing this alumni worked there I asked if I could cover it for the radio station. As the one-time news director for the station I did cover local, high-profile stories in the past. When I reached out to him if I could get a press pass, he said not only could I do that, but as he was the product manager for the game, I would be invited with the other press on a tour of the plant and lunch in the executive dining room afterwards. As you might have guessed, the developer was Donald Trump, the game maker was Milton Bradley, and the rest, as they say, is history. Video proof can be found in this news clip I recorded on VHS tape then and posted to YouTube. Incidentally, the college radio station exposed me to another 2016 U.S. Presidential candidate. The son of Bernie Sanders handed me a radio station application; at the time his Dad was the mayor of Burlington, Vermont. As a native New Englander whose family was from Vermont, I knew of his father well, before many around the country would decades later.

Though I never knew for sure, another case of networking may have come in handy as well. Over the course of an overnight softball marathon on campus, some DJs were caught by campus police with alcohol in the studios. The campus police were unlocking the doors for the morning DJ, who just happened to be the Academic Vice President for the college, who did not know the station would be occupied at that hour. After the incident I was paraded before the associate dean of students who, as judge, jury and executioner, ordered the radio station off the air indefinitely (something he threatened to do a lot). However it never happened, and I was given a stern warning and said we would remain on the air. Again I don’t know what he said or did, or if he did say anything at all, but did the Academic V.P. say something, perhaps to the college president whose office was next to his, that may have reversed this? I don’t know, and I never asked. Over the course of the year I got to know the V.P. well, as he reached out to me when he first came to campus the summer before as he tried and failed to get a radio station at his last school. He was a great friend of the station, and when he expressed interest in doing an early Sunday morning radio show, a timeslot we could never get a student to fill for obvious reasons, it worked out to be a great win-win. Especially, perhaps, when this situation came up.

There’s no substitute for real, practical experience – A lot of my hands-on approach to, well, just about everything I do was nurtured greatly at the college radio station. Covering the explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger my freshman year taught me how to work together as a team when things were moving fast and not all of the information was available. That was later reinforced when I spent the day shadowing the news director of a local radio station. And there’s no better way to learn you’re not prepared for everything than engineering the broadcast of a college hockey game in a sparsely attended, freezing cold hockey rink, and the equipment failed and the broadcast never happened. All of these things happened well before my official, academic internship the summer before my senior year, and taught me much, much more.

The role of music in my life – Prior to signing on the air my freshman year, I had a limited range of musical tastes, and probably even less appreciation for it. Spending 4 years on a radio station that literally exposed me to every genre of music, coupled with experiencing it through and with others, brought this appreciation to a great height. Maybe that’s why I work best with ambient sound surrounding me rather than silence. Today I still enjoy almost all music, but 80’s alternative rock still holds a special place in my heart, and ears.

Deconstructing My College Radio Experience

When I first signed up for my college radio station, I had no idea what impact it would have on my life. Immersing myself with a great cast of people allowed me to try, fail, succeed and learn to degrees I couldn’t get in the classroom. Passion of course played a great part of this. Where I was and am passionate about my chosen career path in computer technology, the foundation for the successes – and failures – I have had in my career were built on a well-rounded foundation of both my classroom and broadcast radio education. Whether or not the school took something like this into consideration when they decided to drop the broadcast license, I have no idea.

Thank God for college radio!

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This is from The Hot Iron, a journal on business and technology by Mike Maddaloni.

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