WQKE Alumni

College was pretty great. That’s not a statement that reinvents the wheel or anything, but college played a pivotal part in my life. No, it didn’t shape my career path at all. In fact, I spent four years learning the ins and outs of audio and radio production just so I could become a graphic and web designer once I got out of school. Money well spent.

The best things that came out of college for me, though, were (get those hankies ready) the friends that I made. They’re still my best friends to this day, and I don’t know where I’d be in my real life (read: not work) without college. I’ve always been a geek, so I probably would have wound up doing this stuff whether I went to college or not.

The major force behind my college career was WQKE (The Quake) – home of Groundbreaking College Radio. I started college as a Sociology major, and one semester at The Quake was all I needed to convince me to change everything and bury myself in radio. It was rare that I had less than three or four shows each week, not to mention the hours spent in the station for meetings, parties, video games and just general hangs. It was probably one of the most important experiences of my life.

So, when I saw that the current Quake didn’t have a website up and running, I sent a message to my old college advisor (and faculty advisor to WQKE) offering my services. They’re apparently in some kind of fund holding pattern (nothing new here), but he did lament the fact that we had no website dedicated to our alumni. That got me to thinking, and I set out on some research to see just what kind of site I could put together.

Enter BuddyPress, something I had never used before. I did some reading, did some testing and found that, for what I was doing, it wasn’t going to be that hard to learn and integrate. So, I spent a weekend huddled over the computer clicking and clacking away at the keyboard until I had a somewhat finished product. It was a similar weekend to the ones I would spend huddled over the soundboard in Yokum Hall clicking and clacking the knobs and sliders on our mixers.

What you have before you now is my first run at BuddyPress and the first (to my knowledge) home for Groundbreaking Alumni. Now let’s just hope the website is better attended than the Community Service meetings were.