I come from a country in which extracurriculars are organized by the school and most of the time there are about 5 of them and they are so boring that no one even comes to the first meeting. That’s why when I saw endless tables during the club fair at Swarthmore, I got so excited and signed up for about 10 clubs at once. Of course I wasn’t able to attend all of them, but one of them became a getaway hour of a week for me.

Before coming to Swarthmore I’ve watched many hours of people DJing live so as soon as I saw a banner saying Swarthmore Radio, I walked straight to that table. The first meeting went smooth and I signed up for a show on Monday at 10PM. Fortunately, I got my spot and I was looking forward to the coming Monday.

I spent about 4 hours on Sunday planning the playlist and what I was going to say and when. On Monday at 9:50PM I shared the link WSRNFM.ORG to the radio station on my Instagram, so that anyone could join. Listening to the recording of my first ever show makes me laugh: terrible music selection (even with all the time put in to create the playlist) and me stuttering and afraid of saying something not in a way I planned to say it.

In a couple of weeks I got the hang of it. I stopped creating playlists and just rolled with whatever I felt like 5 minutes before the show started. I still kept a theme to the show, like the 90s hiphop, house and techno, requests only; but talking was way more natural without me scripting it. Sometimes I would even talk for a bigger part of the show than the music would play. I started getting messages from all over the world from my friends, which added some delight to being on air, as I knew it wasn’t just people from Swarthmore listening to it, and that I was global with even my family sometimes tuning in from Belarus.

The radio station became a relaxation place for me. My friends regularly came over and sometimes we would spend the whole hour just talking to each other on air and enjoying the time together. More and more people were listening and I was so happy when I met a person the other day and they said: “Wait you have that show on our station right?”. It’s not like 100 people listen to it (I wish), but the coincidence of meeting someone who listens to it made me very happy. Next time you want to listen to some good quality music or just have someone talk as some background noise just tune in to WSRNFM.ORG, and trust me – you won’t regret it.