For this podcast my theme was rhetoric in recruiting for potential athletes at the Virginia Military Institute. Before starting this assignment I had imagined everything would be much different.  Since this was my first time ever doing a podcast I went to soundcloud. Sound cloud is an audio distribution platform that allows its users to listen to, share, upload, and record audio. I had remembered that my older brother was telling me about a podcast that he was following on soundcloud called Serial. In this podcast the speaker tells about/investigates a murder that took place in the late 90’s in Baltimore. He seemed like he was really interested in the series and suggested that I listen. I never got an opportunity to listen not because I didn’t want to but because one episode lasted a whopping 60 minutes. I took matters into my own hands and started looking through some podcast myself. I found that there are a wide variety of podcast to choose from like politics, technology, science, storytelling, religious, sports, and the list goes on.

One of the first podcast I listened to was StarTalk Radio with Neil deGrasse Tyson which was a podcast that spoke about different topics and issues in science/space. I also found that podcast are excellent for learning. SoundCloud also had a variety of 3 to 4 minute podcast similar to the length of mine that are motivational and some that were informative. The last type of podcast that I listened to was about sports which I enjoyed the most. As an avid watcher of ESPN television I can say that a lot of the sports shows that I have always watched have podcast versions. The sports podcast that I listened to was ESPN sports analyst Steven A. Smith.

As far as the actual project goes the first thing I had to decide was what type of software I was going to be using. Since I didn’t have since I did not have a mac computer I couldn’t use garage band but eventually slimmed it down to Ardour and Audacity which I think were both class suggestions (I chose audacity). After downloading the software I feel like it was really confusing and hard to use. I tried asking other people that had more experience and I tried google searching “how to use audacity”. I found that the best thing for me to do was to just YouTube search how to use the software. It showed me everything that I needed to know.

Additional problems that I ran into were in the recording process. The initial recording was the hardest part. As soon as I hit the record but I magically started to stumble over my words. It took me multiple tries to get the initial recording the way I wanted it. I also ran into problems with finding places to record. I did not want to record in my room because my roommates play a lot of video games and that would not do anything but add background noise. Trying to sync me trying to find an empty room and the availability of other cadets to interview took a lot longer than I expected. All of these were minor compared to the major problem that I ran into, editing. I had all sorts of things that I really wanted to do but simply just did not know how to. After a few days of fooling around with the software I finally learned a few things. I learned how to fade in and out, delete pieces of audio, and insert audio clips from YouTube videos and my own music. All of these were very helpful in getting me to my final result.

The one and most important thing that I discovered is that there is a lot more potential for creativity in assignments like these rather than writing the cliché “3-5 page essay”. This potential for creativity comes with a higher bar for success. That being said I felt that I needed to take a risk with this project so I did. I am did my podcast as if it were a radio show “Keysus Sports Talk Radio”. When I finished my first recording my voice did not sound like I wanted it to. It didn’t sound bad but it was just unusual and sort of unique. It sounded like the radio when someone calls in and they sort of sound