TITLE
"Triton Tools & Tidbits" Podcast S1
2020
WHO
For the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs🡥 during my time with the International Students & Programs Office🡥 at UC San Diego!
WHAT / WHY
A podcast season aimed at helping students navigate the beginning of education and the pandemic at UC San Diego.
📖 PROCESS
The first quarter of remote learning was falling upon UC San Diego like a luminous cloud when the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs office reached out to me to help launch a podcast they were rushing to starting called Triton Tools & Tidbits. They had the motivation and conviction to make one, as well as the ideas of who to include, but did not have much else in terms of realization of the series or the production techniques.
STEP ONE: CLARIFYING & GENERATING AN IDEA
Through a few meetings and several email chains, I had seen the
word 'podcast' thrown around repetitively and superflously, like
a oversaturated one-liner from famous pop culture film. It was
unclear to me what the specificity of the podcast was—a casual
host-based talk show? A tightly honed editorial deep dive? 3
friends hashing it out with mics?
To match the professional nature of UC San Diego as an
educational institution while also leaning more on the side of
analytical pursuit rather than just pure spectacle
entertainment, I proposed an NPR-styled podcast that featured
journalistic interviews edited tightly together towards a
thesis.
STEP TWO: PRODUCTION
With the shift to online learning happening within practically
two weeks, VCSA and the whole campus for that matter was
temultously transition to something completely undone—and that
chaotic rush was more present than ever in the production. Early
episodes needed to be turned around in a week: ideation,
interviews, writing, recording, editing, post-processing...it
was done to the best with the constraints, but definitely was
not sustainable in a long term. I'm very thankful for founding
collaboraters David Yang and Ian Daly for helping share the
Season 1 episode workload, as well as helping in other areas of
production.
I also took the responsbility of producing animated
Instagram Stories🡥
to promote the podcast each week.
STEP THREE: RESULTS
The series did well, with peak episodes amassing around 300 listeners within the first few days—not bad for hitting the ground running. We covered a healthy range of topics and departments, from thinking about healthy routines and diets with UCSD Recreation to critiquing behaviors from unstructured time with a insightful Cognitive Science graduate student.
STEP FOUR: PASSING THE TORCH
After the first season came to a close, I found it best to pass the project along so I could focus on other projects within my department. In heading out, I prepared written guides on the production process, best interview practices, and passed all final assets over to VCSA. I even prepped the After Effects project file for the Instagram Stories into a template for easy setup!