World college radio day
Photo Courtesy of SUNY Geneseo
Last Friday, Oct. 2, SUNY Geneseo celebrated World College Radio Day alongside a myriad of other higher education institutions around the globe. World College Radio Day, for those who may not know, is an international celebration of college radio stations and the mediums they provide for student voices to be heard. The celebration was first created in December 2010 by students and faculty at Saint Xavier University who wished to collaborate more with other college radio stations to raise awareness about the power of college radio.
On the day of the celebration, the main event is a 26-hour marathon broadcast featuring segments from participating colleges. In the past, a whopping 600 college radio stations contributed their own work to the College Radio Foundation. This year, SUNY Geneseo was one of the hundreds of campuses to provide a segment for the broadcast, hosted by SUNY Geneseo’s campus radio station: WGSU 89.3-FM.
WGSU’s segment in the broadcast featured some of the SUNY Geneseo students in the WGSU Student Leadership Staff: Marketing Director Ava Brucie, Operations Manager Kyle Bulger, Geneseo Today Host Kate Hanlon, and Co-Sports Director Liam Kost. The segment was slotted into the international broadcast for all colleges to hear. Their segment was about 30 minutes long and centered around the theme of the celebration: Hope—always in the air. The tracks and mic breaks featured in the segment reflect greatly upon this theme. WGSU uploaded their contribution to the celebration on their Youtube channel for everyone to hear.
When asked about World College Radio Day, Kyle Bulger said: “It’s always fun to celebrate our station, we always do an event like this every semester…For World College Radio Day in the Fall, and WGSU Day in the spring. We usually set up some outdoor games like cornhole and can jam, but unfortunately the weather was a bit too crappy for that. But, you know, that’s what College Radio is all about, you’re bound to face unexpected difficulties and you just gotta roll with it…Our station was also honored to be included in the worldwide College Radio broadcast.”
One of the many aims of World College Radio Day is to encourage students who do not normally listen to their college’s radio station(s) to just listen for this one day. Supporting this aim, SUNY Geneseo’s own radio station—WGSU—participated in the celebration by bringing their programming outside of the studio. To boost awareness for World College Radio Day, students involved in WGSU set up a table outside of Blake Hall with a speaker playing the segment they submitted to the College Radio Foundation. After the segment, the students running the table played some of WGSU’s student-run DJ programs, including Henry McConnell’s 90s-2000s rock and grunge-based show, “The Fifth Gear,” and Casey Dapshi’s acoustic and folk-based show “Tire Swing Tunes.”
Although it was raining, and the planned festivities were pushed back until the rain subsided, WGSU still brought optimism and light-heartedness to campus through their broadcast. Geneseo’s “Voice of the Valley” also gave out WGSU 89.3-FM stickers (that you may or may not have seen around campus) in order to commemorate the passion they have for participating at the radio station. The students also displayed old track logs from their studio that visitors were invited to flip through. This display of WGSU history harkened back to the spirit of World College Radio Day as a memorialization of college radio stations around the world.
During their celebration of World College Radio Day, students could sign-up to join WGSU or receive a quick tour of SUNY Geneseo’s radio station.
In celebrating World College Radio Day, the students at WGSU were able to share something that they love with not only their immediate community here on campus, but also with other colleges around the world who share a passion for radio.