Radio Sonar
Solent Universities student radio station
Throughout the past two years at university, myself and three of my course mates have been producing and presenting our very own radio show which airs out live on our student radio station, Radio Sonar.
We named ourselves the 'MMJ Gals' due to all studying Multimedia Journalism. Our show aired for 2 hours in second year, but due to the high demand in third year, this was reduced to just one.
Our show is largely one with our conversations and topics we speak about surrounding the entertainment industry. In second year, our show aired between the times of 6-8pm on a Wednesday and third year, 5-6pm on a Thursday.
Producing and presenting this show together over the course of two years has allowed us to progress and contribute further to the radio element of our course, and has set us all up further for the industry if this is the area of journalism any of us decide to go into. Myself and the girls all have a huge passion for radio, so this was something we all put our best efforts into.
Presenting this show has also immensely helped with my own live radio presentation skills. We always present without a script and just a schedule of the content we believe our listeners would be interested in week to week. I've also been able to corporate these skills into our news days throughout my time at university, which has been something many lecturers have highlighted.
Being a part of the society Radio Sonar also highlights relevant experience in how I've continued to further my skills throughout the past two years outside of my course environment.
Our social media profile
As well as producing and presenting our own radio show, we also decided to take the plunge and create our own social media page on Twitter to keep our listeners up to date with our shows, as well as just what we're up to in general.
All four of us were logged in to the account, so all played a part in the posts. The social media job was never left down to just one person. We were all in it together.
We made sure to keep very active on this, and posted a variety of tweets such as images, polls, status updates and video content.
After having this for two years, we believe we gained a good amount of followers for a student radio station page (we nearly have 100!) We will most probably keep this page going once we graduate to update our followers on what we're all doing after university, especially if any of us go into radio!
Becoming an award winning radio show
Over the past two years on Radio Sonar, one of the most rewarding times for both myself and the rest of the girls was the fact that we won an award in the first year of our show for the "Best social media profile of 2018/19".
As said previously, we made sure to really keep our presence on there, so it was amazing to be given recognition for that, let alone now being an award winning radio show!
The awards was all in all a fabulous night. We were nominated for two awards - the best social media profile and the best entertainment show. Even though we were quite new members of the society, we were still made to feel very welcome and it gave us the drive to work even harder in third year to be even more successful than we were in second year.
Of course, we made sure to share our good news with our followers straight away!
I made sure to keep my own followers updated on our award too
R A D I O
S O N A R
Reference from Radio Sonar
"Dear Solent,
I can confirm that Katie Woodcock has completed work experience with Radio Sonar from September 2018 to May 2019.
Katie's attitude has been second to none, and she has demonstrated natural ability within a number of areas of radio and broadcasting. Her confidence with speaking on-air, combined with the work she has put in to grow her show's brand on social media, has paid dividends for all parties.
I would absolutely recommend her to any employer.
Kind regards,
Ben Winter
Station Manager
Radio Sonar”