I just opened my email inbox to see an email from the WAMH programming director about scheduling, which reminded me that I have yet to write about radio!
Going into college, the only thing I was sure of was that I wanted to be part of student radio. Unlike some other schools, radio at Amherst is uncompetitive and open to anyone. While you do have to be trained in board operation and FCC rules, there are no other requirements to having your very own radio show where you can broadcast literally anything you want over the airwaves.
I’ve had a show since freshman year called Gut Feeling—an homage to my rumbly stomach and good intuition. For the first few semesters, I dedicated a lot of time to carefully planning my shows around a theme. A few times, I researched the life and work of a specific artist and alternated between their music and biography; other times, I dedicated the hour to a genre or movement. I’ve taken a lot of courses in the Portuguese department at UMass that centered heavily on music, and have often featured some of my favorites from Brazil and Cape Verde on the radio.
Senior year, I’ve merged Gut Feeling with my friend Jacob’s show, Counting Down by Threes, to create a brand new Frankenstein show: Counting Guts by Three Feelings. In a very characteristically senior-in-college fashion, all planning has gone out the window. Jacob and I usually show up on Sunday nights and play whatever comes to mind, usually alternating turns picking songs. We also do some talking, some joke telling, and once, when I was on my own for a show, I read and reacted to the New York Times’s “Social Cues” column. Since we broadcast on Sunday nights, sometimes we just put on an hour of music and do our work in the studio. Essentially, it’s loose and it’s meant to be fun. You can put however much effort you want into your show, as long as you actually turn up on time and broadcast within FCC guidelines.
I also was on the WAMH executive board sophomore and junior years, working with the social media, social events, and archives teams. We met Sunday nights as a collective, and branched off during the weeks to work on smaller projects. My favorite part of my time on e-board was going through WAMH history in the archives in Frost Library’s basement. WAMH actually used to be called WAMF, and has been around since the 40s. The role of radio in college life (and general life, of course) has drastically changed over the years, and has become much less formal and more of a for-fun type thing, for better or for worse. WAMH used to broadcast important speakers and events (like JFK in Johnson Chapel and Vietnam War protests), cover sports games, and have daily news segments. Requirements for music shows also used to be much stricter, with it being mandatory for new releases and smaller artists to make up a significant proportion of airtime. It’s been very cool to learn about Amherst history through the evolution of radio, and I do wish sometimes that I got to be part of college radio during a different era.
If you’re interested in listening to WAMH and you’re not located within radiowaves’ reach, you can listen online at https://wamhradio.mixlr.com. WAMH is on air every day from 4pm-2am.