Alumni

Big Plans for the Future

Nowadays WMXM has had a live web cast via live365.com (see www.lfcradio.com), and there are big plans for the future. Lambert wants to replace the old antenna with a multidirectional one that would vastly increase the station’s radius.

Current students want future station members to carry on the work they started. “We’re working on ways to improve our jobs so that when we’re done with them we can teach other people how to do what we did so the station doesn’t just die when we’re gone,” says current general manager Ethan Helm ’07, who does a show on Sunday afternoons called “All Christian-inspired Music Does not Suck.”  

The station has booked some bands on campus and is also slowly expanding the music collection. Park, who saved WMXM’s vinyl collection, would like to see the station forget more ties with the surrounding area. “There’s tremendous potential for working with the community, if they can help us get to the 24/7 goal that I and the executive board have.”

Dean Tyler is pushing for more links between the classroom and out-of-classroom experience. “I’d like to see a link with the Communications Department to have some sort of long-term plan or proposal for the station. If someone would say to me, ‘This is where I’d like to see the radio station go in five years and we’d like the money,’ I’d like to do that.”
 
Station alums tout the benefits of their experience. Shillinglaw says her experience at WMXM was invaluable. “The only reason I became a professional on-air announcer was due to my experience at WMXM. Without a station, no student has a chance of getting much of a career going in radio—experience is essential.

“Plus, cool music is always of value, in itself. The public speaking skills you exercise in radio are valuable as well,” she adds.

Monahan, now a sports producer at KSTP-TV in Minneapolis, says, “At a liberal arts college, I think you should have a thriving newspaper and radio station.”

Cara Jepsen is a writer and yoga teacher who moonlighted as a punk rock DJ in Chicago for over a decade after college and her first-person essays occasionally air on the WBEZ-FM radio program “Eight Forty-Eight.”