“Do you want your voice heard?
Do you want to say ANYTHING?”
Walking through the fourth floor of Campus Center, you can hear the voices of members of NJIT’s University Serving Organizations—formerly known as the X Clubs. This semester, new voices join the floor’s chatter, but these voices broadcast from a studio.
WJTB, NJIT’s radio club, has risen from the basement of the Campus Center to join The Vector Newspaper, Nucleus Yearbook and the Student Activities Council among others on the fourth floor.
Marisa Ghilarducci, a senior Biomedical Engineering major and the President of WJTB Radio, seemed excited about the move. “It was just really reaffirming for the club to be seen as one of the other X clubs and be on the same floor with all the other X clubs, and I think that move just kind of changed the way that people saw the club.”
Listeners can tune in on the internet streaming website tunein.com and search for “WJTB.” New radio content will be recorded in the studio and uploaded to Spotify for those who didn’t get a chance to hear it live.
If an NJIT student wants to get on the air, Ghilarducci says that “It’s not really a very long process. … All you have to do is have an idea before you fill out the show request form, but before you actually get on air you have to go through training to learn how to use all the equipment.”
Ghilarducci said that anyone new to radio can also have an executive board member on air with them to help with the technical aspects and limit “dead air or down time where they’re fumbling and ‘um-ing’ and ‘ah-ing’.”
Tuning in to the issue of new radio hosts getting used to being on air, Ghilarducci said, “If you don’t have consistent topics to talk about you’re just going to forget, especially if you have any amount of stage fright. You’re going to start talking in front of a microphone and you’re going to be like ‘oh fuck I don’t remember anything I was going to say.’”
WJTB will also be working with the NJIT Communications Department to develop a class where students can make a radio show and are graded on the content they produce. Though this means that WJTB will be producing a large variety of content, it also means that air time will be harder to come by.
Ghilarducci pitched WJTB saying that “We give everyone a voice, we don’t discriminate against what content we want to be on our stream and don’t want to be on our stream…. That’s what we were saying at the student involvement fair. Do you want your voice heard? Do you want to say anything?”
“When I came to NJIT,” Ghilarducci continued, “I was looking for a club that was going to accept me and support me in a way that WJTB did and I think that almost everyone else in the club can attest to that. We’re just very welcoming and very supportive and we want anything that you dream of to go on our stream.”
WJTB meets Tuesdays at 9 P.M. and Wednesdays at 2:30 P.M. in Campus Center 460.
Photo by Katherine Ji
