Margaret, Emily, Leslie, and I decided to do our radio show on UMW throughout the ages. This title doesn’t accurately describe what we are doing since UMW has only been around for less than ten years. We are starting with the first opening of the State Normal and Industrial School for Women. This was originally an all girls school aimed towards preparing girls to become teachers. Since then a lot has changed. During our broad cast we hope to point out some of the many ways that the school has evolved over the ages. We plan on doing this through interviews with former UMW students. We will also be using commercials of the time period that we are describing within our radio show.

We spend the majority of our first meeting researching important date for the college. For example, when the school became co-ed, when it was segregated, and the multiple name changes. We also found some music and commercials that would have been likely during many of these time periods. We have laid out the outline of out radio show. This includes what times we are going to focus on and where we are going to place commercials and bumpers. We are working on contacting UMW alumni from these time periods to get their insight into what the campus and community were like during these time periods.

During our second meeting we were able to record a made up interview from around 1910. This would have been the first graduating class from the college. Since not many, if any, of these students are surviving, we decided to use the information we could find to make a false persona. We were able to record this interview, a commercial from the time, and our first bumper. We still need to go through this recording and cut out some of the bloopers and add audio effect. We have roughly a third of our radio show recorded!

During our third meeting we had quite a few technical difficulties. When we tried to open the audio project we had recorded last class it had saved itself in 5 second intervals. After freezing up the computer a couple of times we could not figure out how to open them together. After deciding that we did not have time to sort through and put them all back together, we tweeted out to Jim Groom praying that he could fix it. We decided not to waste any more time on trying to retrieve the old recording and started on the next section of our show. We recorded an interview from the 1970′s. This was during the time when the college was transitioning to a co-ed educational institution. For the interview we read the responses of an alumni that we emailed our interview questions to. We were also able to record another commercial from the time and bumper. We edited this new audio and uploaded it to sound cloud so that we would have 5 minutes for class.

After class the great Jim Groom was able to salvage our first recording session. After realizing that our original audio recording on a lap top wasn’t very good quality. Jim Groom let us record our last section in the radio room since we didn’t want to go out and buy fancy recording microphones. We recorded our last section of our radio show which takes place in current time. We talked about how UMW is now and what big changes we have noticed over the ages.

Since Spring Break was coming up and everyone was going away from school we decided to meet the monday night that we got back. During this time we were able to finish editing and add sound effects to our radio show. We then put all the pieces and saved it as one giant mp3 file. We then uploaded our finished project to sound cloud. At last we were done!

Making a radio show was a very educational experience. I learned how to better use audacity and other audio tools. I also enjoyed finding out so much information about the history of Mary Washington. Unfortunately I felt a serious time constraint on this project. With it being a group project it was very difficult for all of us to find a time to get together. If we had more time we would have been able to meet with alumni and actually record them answering the questions. I think that would have made the interviews have more genuine emotion (not that we didn’t try, because we really did). Overall this project was a lot of work and very time consuming! It was a good learning experience, but I wouldn’t want to make another one any time soon.