Last time we talked, I related my dream. Now it’s time for me to, belatedly, explain how I plan to achieve it.

For the last two or so years, I’ve worked hard to help promote iHub, and nowadays I run iHub’s social media and website. My goal with these has always been to talk more about students and their projects, but I’ve never had the time to pull together the materials I need. In fact, sitting around on my tablet are more than a dozen photos that I took, meaning to post them, then didn’t get the chance.

Clearly, I need a better strategy.

A couple months ago, I worked with a team of students and staff to pull together iHub’s largest ever open house. During one of our brainstorming sessions Mr. Sarte suggested that, instead of a session where students stood up and presented about their projects and the school, we could have one where a couple of students interviewed a few of their peers in the style of a talk show. He thought it would be interesting to have my fellow grade 11 Olivia, and me conduct it.

I loved the idea.

We weren’t sure if the session would really work out, but we decided that, in iHub spirit, we’d try it out and see if it did. I feel it worked out quite well.

With the success of iHub Open filling my sails, I suggested to grade 10s Jazmine and Ailis, who are in charge of organising iHub’s first ever showcase event, iHub Spotlight, that it would be interesting to conduct a similar session at that event as well. They agreed.

So here’s the plan: At iHub Spotlight, I’ll interview five students, each for about five minutes, on their inquiry or IDS, live on stage. I’ve asked my brother, who operates sound at iHub’s live events, to record the interviews, then help me record several, longer-form, follow-up interviews with the five students, and a couple others. I’ll then piece together the interviews, and perhaps some other pieces of audio and insight, into several episodes of a podcast series, one episode for each project. They’ll then be posted to iHub’s website and social media.

I don’t know yet whether this will work out. If my experience at iHub Open taught me anything, it’s that I need to develop a lot as an interviewer. But hopefully, with the extra research I’m doing into each of the interviewees’ projects and fields of interest, and a leveller head, I’ll improve.

And perhaps this will get me one step closer to my Dream.

I’ve got a couple other parts to this plan, and a couple other plans to my IDS, which I’ll share with you in my next post. That one will be coming out in just a couple of days.

Talk with you then.

When I was a very little child, I had this dream of being a radio host. I suppose it was because I listened to CBC religiously, and, since I had little exposure to other culture, an employee for that august corporation was one of the few professions I had to aspire to.

Jump forward to my second year of high school. By this time, I had already been on CBC twice (and on and in a few other journalistic forms of media a half dozen other times), and I had even successfully invited a producer from CBC Radio to speak at iHub Talks. But by now I had also long discarded my dream of hosting a radio programme, or going out into the field to report on stories of national importance for the evening news.

Yet every now and then, the profession would seem to come up again. Someone might comment on an essay I wrote and suggest I go into journalism. Someone would ask if I could exert my contacts in the media to get iHub in the news. I had begun to pay more attention to interviewing styles when listening to the radio, and to journalistic practices when reading the paper.

I had just spent the last few months working all-out on VoteMate, a website and app to connect voters and candidates during the provincial election. The day before election-day, I was invited to CBC’s studios in Vancouver to talk with Stephen Quinn, the host of CBC Radio’s weekday afternoon drive programme, On The Coast, about the project. Yet more fascinating to me than the interview itself was the chance I had to talk with the people who put the show together every day, just before it went to air that Monday.

I spoke for the first time in person with Lisa Christiansen, On The Coast’s traffic and music reporter (I’d talked with her over the Internet before), and chatted again with a couple people I’d met previously. Lisa Christiansen especially was inspiring, and she suggested that, if I was ever interested in journalism, I look into BCIT’s broadcast journalism programme, which partnered with the CBC for internships.

But perhaps the moment that stuck most in my mind was as I was leaving, when the man who was showing me out first complemented me on my speaking ability (I expect this is something they do to every teen or pre-teen who goes on the show, but it was nice anyways), then asked if I had ever thought of going into journalism. “You really should,” he said, when I didn’t reply.

I’d worked on VoteMate because I believed in democracy and wanted very badly to participate. By this time, I was already beginning to form a better idea of what democracy meant, beyond just voting and representation, that centred more around the necessity of the judicial and journalistic organisations. I had no hope and no interest of getting involved in the judiciary, but I decided that journalism, perhaps, might hold some potential for me.

So that’s what I’m working on this year. I plan to be blogging a lot more about my IDS this time, and, as an encouragement to do such, I’ll be separating out my ideas a bit more, each to its own post. This is the first; In my second, I hope to outline what I plan to do.

Talk with you then.