In today's post–Serial world, podcasting has reached an ubiquity that few saw coming. It stands to reason that the podcast boom would make its way to Penn. Here are just a few of Penn's podcasters, whether they're academic departments, individual students, or...Career Services? The more you know.
Knowledge@Wharton is the Wharton School’s online business journal. The Knowledge@Wharton team produces podcasts by selecting segments from their radio show, Wharton Business Radio on SiriusXM. The podcast’s audience is mainly affiliated with Wharton or Philadelphia, but people all over the world who are hungry for business news and trends listen as well. Its content is not just about business, finance, and investing—the podcast covers leadership, social impact management, marketing, and technology as well.
Guests range from Wharton experts to non–affiliated business authors. Rachel Kipp, Associate Editorial Director for Knowledge@Wharton, says that her team wants their audience to “be engaged and feel like [the team is] somebody they would want to hang out with and learn from.”
In the weekly Career Services podcast, Information Resources Manager Michael DeAngelis and Associate Director Mylène Kerschner have a friendly chat about the resources students and alumni can use for their job search. They not only discuss general topics such as career fairs and online resources but also produce episodes that each focus on a particular group in their audience, such as pre–med students, undergraduate students, and Ph.D students. The hosts invite a diverse group of guests as well: there are episodes with people from CAPS, people from the Theme Year, and employers at career fairs. There are even fun holiday–themed episodes (for Halloween, they talked about horror stories from job interviews).
When asked what they want students to take away from their podcast, Mylène said that she wants to let students know that they’re not alone and that there are people who can help you find a career. Michael wants to bust some Career Services myths: “Do you realize that people are just saying OCR to encompass everything that we do?”
College freshman Jack Biddle runs a basketball website with his high school friend, and they publish a podcast on SoundCloud to go along with it. Their content mostly covers college basketball prospects and what’s important in basketball for the week, but the episodes closer to important dates in the season are themed. Their goal is to provide correct statistics and information for free (which, according to Jack, is surprisingly quite rare). Jack works at all the Quaker home games for athletic communications and says he sees himself working in basketball in the future as well, whichever form that takes.
A second–year medical student at the Perelman School of Medicine, Ryan O’Keefe brings conversations on the intersection of entrepreneurship and medical technology to a wider audience. Although his main audience is students or people early in their careers who want to learn about the opportunities that an MD degree affords them, he makes attempts in every episode to make it broad and interesting enough so that anybody who is interested in the field would get something out of it as well.
Of course, juggling med school and a weekly podcast is difficult: to continue publishing podcasts in his clinical year (when med school really starts to pick up), Ryan has hoarded 20 to 30 episodes in the backlog that will get him through the next year. He says that hosting the podcast has given him opportunities to speak to inspiring experts in the medical field and to practice interviewing people, which is an integral part of learning how to be a good physician. “You have to be thinking on your feet," he says. "What kinds of questions do you want to ask when you’re looking for specific information? Every interaction you have with a patient is in a way like interviewing someone.”
