This meme is going around Twitter and I’m sure a few other sites, so I figured I would post it here. It says to post a picture of your 20 year old self so here ya go:

So that is me hanging out at WMBC, my college’s radio station. It was, as you can see, not anything fancy. It was pretty much in a closet in the student center. I requested one of the late evening show times because no one was around on campus so my music wouldn’t offend anyone. Not that I listened to things that were explicit or profane (and you couldn’t play that on the radio without bleeping it anyway) but the “cool” music people that were in charge of the station had lots of opinions and they liked to play hard rock/experimental music during the day and I wanted to play what I wanted to play. I had elaborate themed playlists that I created for each week which included my favorite artists and then the required two spins from the CD collection in the station.

The one very **high tech** thing the station did have was it was set up to stream online. It was all live streaming so you had to listen when the show was on, but I remember harassing many friends online and asking them to please tune in. If I recognized their usernames, I would do little shout-outs on air.

After I graduated from UMBC, they redid all of this stuff and I think the radio station went with it, which is a shame. But radio has changed so much. I interned in a local station my last semester and then worked there for a hot minute after graduating. It was a strange mix of old and new – the station recording their commercials and breaks on essentially 8-track cartridges. But the station I worked for, the sister station, was 100% automated and on a computer. We ripped the CDs and the program queued up the songs and we pre-recorded station breaks. Took about an hour to record what was needed for the day.

In the end, working in radio wasn’t for me. It’s more about advertising than the music and I got stuck in a pop country station which was of no interest to me so it was hard to be excited about things I was playing. It did teach me how to slow down when talking which I think helped with my ability to speak to groups at the library.

So, yeah, that was Sam at 20.