Internship Experience #1: 90.5 FM WCBE Columbus
As a part of gaining professional experience along with my academic learning, I’m currently on the internship portion career as a sound professional. As a required experience for graduation, the Capital University Music Technology program expects each graduating student to have around 270 hours of internship experience. For my internship, I had an amazing opportunity to work at the 90.5 FM WCBE Columbus radio station providing broadcast promotional materials, helping set up and run major events, and working to get Columbus City School students more involved in professional audio and marketing experiences.
The start of my internship search was slightly nerve-wracking, to say the least. I spent over four weeks cold calling and emailing different recording studios, media production companies, and live sound A/V installation services from the end of December all the way up until the start of February. Some notable places I applied to around the city of Columbus included Oranjudio Recording Studio, Blue Moon Recording Studio, TechArt Productions, Slingshot Media Group, Vital Companies, Allegro Media Design, Brainstorm Media design, and more. A few companies sent me responses saying they weren’t looking for interns for the spring season, but most places ignored my initial request and multiple follow-ups. This was somewhat expected, especially as someone who’s brand new in the industry with no real network of career-starting connections, but it was still heavily disheartening in my search. However, I was able to find an opportunity at 90.5 FM WCBE Columbus through another friend who had already landed an internship there. I emailed back and forth with Johnny DiLoretto and we scheduled a short interview for the end of January (which ended up being delayed to the start of February because of weather/travel difficulties and closures).
During my interview with Johnny, I was able to get a small tour of the WCBE station office, seeing the studios where they record and broadcast their shows daily shows from. I also saw their room full of CDs, cassette tapes, and vinyl records, which are currently being catalogued and stored, and I was shown the back offices/kitchen area where the other workers and interns do their audio edits, have meetings, and take breaks. After the tour, Johnny and I talked a lot about how I would fit into the radio station and what my responsibilities would be. He started off by asking a few questions at first, which gave me the sense that it was an interview, but the conversation shifted into more of my responsibilities as a given, which gave me a lot of confidence. I was told about the work I would do with Columbus City School students from Fort Hayes technical school, the setup efforts I would be assisting with for the spring fund drive, and the marketing/promotional initiatives I would be responsible for advancing.
I was really excited to get started on my first day. I have a specific passion for radio and broadcast and I was inspired by the mission of the station and show hosts that work at WCBE. Upon my first staff meeting on my first day, I was able to introduce myself and see that they were all skilled, creatively inclined, and passionate about seeing the station succeed. This made me want to help out in any way I can, and I soon had a bunch of different and varying responsibilities to help out around the station. Within my first few weeks, I was writing promotional scripts for student project initiatives, I was recording/editing both my own and other student promotions, and I was getting involved in a community partnership program called the Local Music Alliance, which involved cross-promotion between WCBE and local small businesses. Despite the large amount of work available, I definitely felt a sense of belonging and accomplishment with each passing day.
I was also able to learn a lot right off the bat, especially in the way of software. The station utilizes Audacity as their main digital audio workstation, and as someone more familiar with AVID ProTools, I had to quickly teach myself the “in’s and out’s” of the recording software. I also had to get familiar with the different studio spaces and the inputs and outputs for each. Additionally, I’ve learned a lot about other aspects of radio/broadcast work like speaking tone and inflection and language-based marketing. In other words, I’ve definitely gotten more of an understanding into how an audience perceives information based solely on what is said and how it sounds, and with radio broadcast promotions, it’s all purely auditory to the audience. As a sound designer, this is a great benefit to helping me get a better sense into audio perception and how to get audiences psychologically immersed in pieces of audio.
Altogether, over my first 50 hours of the internship, I was able to accomplish a lot working with other high school student interns and getting their voices on the air. I believe that, since the internship requires varying skills like marketing, post-production, mixing and editing, and more, I’m very well suited for this position and I feel confident going forward through the rest of the semester and helping the station with large upcoming events and initiatives like the Spring Fund Drive and live performances.
