I have covered a lot of ground in these blogs. Movies, albums, drones, you name it. But for this last one, I want to step back from all of that and write about something a little more personal: my two years as a student at 90.7 WPSR.
What WPSR Actually Is
For anyone who does not know, 90.7 WPSR is Evansville's Real Variety, a fully operational radio station run entirely by high school students through the Media Communications and Broadcasting program at the Southern Indiana Career and Technical Center. It is not a simulation. It is not practice. It is a real station broadcasting to a real audience, and students are the ones running it.
Two Years, Two Levels
The program runs two years max. Level one as a junior, level two as a senior. I did both. And honestly, the difference between who I walked in as and who I am walking out as is hard to put into words. The technical side of things came first. Learning how to go live on air, managing social media across every platform, writing and publishing blog content, operating broadcast equipment. Skills that actually translate to the real world and ones I did not expect to pick up in a high school classroom.
DJ Nacho Cheese
One of the first things you do when you join the class is create a DJ name. Mine came from a completely random opinion I had about Nacho Cheese Doritos being better than Cool Ranch, and somehow DJ Nacho Cheese stuck. What started as a joke became something I genuinely identify with. That name pushed me to show up differently on air, to be more energetic, more uplifting, more myself. And over time, that version of me on the microphone started bleeding into everyday life too.
What the Class Actually Gave Me
Beyond the technical stuff, this class gave me things that are harder to put on a resume. Communication skills. Confidence. The ability to walk into a room and connect with people I had never met before. Mrs. JoBeth Bootz, our instructor, never treated any of us like just another name on a roster. She saw potential in every single person in that room and did everything she could to give us real opportunities to grow. The friendships I made, the competitions I got to compete in and win, the moments of going live on a station that actual people are listening to, none of that is something I take for granted.
Signing Off
This is my last blog for WPSR, and I genuinely would not trade a single moment of this experience for anything. If you are a student thinking about joining the program, do it. There is nothing else like it.
DJ Nacho Cheese, signing off.
