Through producing audio, students share passions
May 7, 2021
In this day and age, a microphone, laptop and a head of ideas to share with others is truly all one needs to produce their own podcast for free. Websites like SoundCloud and Google Play Music have made self publishing incredibly easy and readily available for anyone.
Using the extra time on their hands during distance learning, a few U-High students have taken initiative and produced their own podcasts to educate others on events, ideas and news that intrigues them.
Senior Zach Sharp produces a podcast about historical events. He came up with the idea for his podcast two year ago, but with some time over quarantine, brought his idea into fruition and published his first episode over the summer. Each episode discusses a different historical event.
“I really love history and I have a lot of really interesting historical events that I like to think about and explore,” Zach said.
Each episode takes a considerable amount of time to research, script and produce.
“I started a rough draft of this episode around two years before, but I never had the time to finish it,” Zach said. “I really put a lot more time and effort into really refining it and getting it down to what I wanted over the summer. Having much more time during quarantine and the school day being more free was helpful.”
In the research for his episodes, Zach is able to come up with original conclusions to share with his listeners.
“I wanted to kind of explore and try to find where the ground of what is considered a war crime becomes blurred,” Zach said. “Such an event that it’s incomprehensible to try and think about suffering on that level, I really wanted to kind of explore what happened there.”
Sophomores Sarina Zhou, Amy Ren and Ida Karateke started Wednesdays with IAS (an abbreviation for their names) after conversations in their Poly Media Club and discussions of societal issues. They work to upload biweekly.
“We sort of thought that it might be fun to create this podcast to sort of supplement what we were discussing in that in a different form of media, so that’s kind of how it all started,” Sarina said.
Similar to Zach, the girls’ curiosity sparked their podcast, and extra time allowed for its completion. Working by Zoom made it easy to collaborate.
“In general it didn’t really stem from extra time, but from sort of this curiosity we had about the societal issues that we were passionate about and how we wanted to discuss them to further our own ideas and opinions but also to put them out in a public format,” Sarina said.
