She credits her decision to pursue a doctorate to the encouraging influence of several Colby-Sawyer faculty. “Colby-Sawyer gave me a great springboard.”
Pastoral Psychologist Barbara Livingston '82
At WSCS-FM, operations fall into six major cateogries:
1. The Air Sound What shall we do on the air? What programs shall we offer? On what schedule? What "special events" will we mark on the air? How? This set of tasks revolves around the creative interpretation of the station's mission -- translating our goals into a vision, and devising the actual programming that airs on WSCS-FM and over our web stream.
2. Community Relations All radio stations must "serve the public interest, convenience and necessity." To do this well, we need strong, active two-way links to the community we serve. There is a set of tasks that centers on making and maintaining these links.
3. Staffing and Training We rely on a very large, all-volunteer staff to perform most of the work at the station. Another set of tasks revolves around recruiting, training, evaluating and motivating these volunteers.
4. Program Resources Whether it is music, news, or pre-recorded informational programming, our air sound involves program resources. This set of tasks centers on creating or acquiring these resources. There is a small budget, administered by the station's faculty advisor for program-related purchases. But we depend most on staff effort to obtain the music we play and to create or acquire the other programming that airs.
5. Technology We depend on a lot of machinery! Computers, microphones and cables, recorders, consoles, the transmitter -- all require monitoring and maintenance. We have a consulting engineer who parachutes in for "the big stuff." We have help from the wonderful Colby-Sawyer IR team on computer matters. But everything else -- from cleaning the CD players to montitoring transmitter performance -- is our responsibility.
6. Record Keeping We are obliged by the FCC to track technical performance and to document our programming. On-air hosts keep logs to record power levels at the transmitter every couple hours, and to document the programming that goes out over the air. Then these logs need to be processed, equipment needs to be checked against reported performance criteria, and reports need to be written up and placed in the station Public File on a regular basis.
The Executive Board is the team of students who take responsibility as a team for all these operations. They have substantial support from the Faculty Advisor and the Work Study students she supervises, and also from a fantastic volunteer staff, drawn from all segments of the campus community as well as surrounding towns.
Together we work hard, because we love what we can do at WSCS-FM.
