Our summer interns rock!

Thanks to financial support from our donors, C89.5 has been offering three paid internships to high school students in our region each summer. This year’s interns have been awesome, working one-on-one with C89.5 staff, learning the ins-and-outs of how a professional radio station operates and contributing their skills and passions to our team.

Elijah is a sophomore at Franklin High School and his passion is voice work. Our program director, Ron Chatman, taught Elijah how to use audio editing software to produce announcements for the station and was impressed by his incredible voice talent and his professionalism. For Elijah, the internship was about doing lots of different creative things that actually mattered and “better than school, which is more about memorizing stuff.”

Sofian, a junior from West Seattle High School, commuted 1½ hours by bus and light rail from West Seattle to get to C89.5 every day because “I make music and I really wanted to work with audio but I also just wanted to know how a radio station works.” He soaked up everything, from balancing the books with our business manager, Yolanda Lopez, to making audio cables with Drew Bailey, to recording voice tracks with Harmony Soleil.

Luz, a senior from the Renton school district, was a rock star this summer. She came to C89.5 with a passion for animation and left with a veritable backpack of new skills and ideas she hopes to use in starting her own digital media company. We were all blown away with her talent, determination, and creative energy. In the first week, she came to Harmony and Bruce Wirth, our membership director, with the idea of producing a cartoon about C89.5.

Over the course of six weeks, Luz created a script and story board and then enlisted fellow interns Elijah  and Sofian plus our Program Director Ron Chatman as voice talents. With the creative input of the C895 team and fellow interns, Luz crafted this hilarious animation promoting our studio upgrade fundraiser.