A group of Penn students founded The FGLI Podcast this semester, aiming to streamline and promote resources and information for first-generation low-income students at Penn.
According to student producers, the goal of the podcast is to share information about being a FGLI student at Penn. College senior Peter Hong, executive producer for the podcast, said that the idea was initially developed last semester, but the podcast was officially founded this fall.
“Navigating college as a FGLI student is unique,” Hong said. “Most of the professional development and networking advice is done from the perspective of someone who already has the resources.”
College junior and executive producer for the podcast Khaliun Dorjmenchim added that The FGLI Podcast hopes to preserve institutional knowledge that FGLI students gain throughout their time at Penn, but is then lost once they graduate.
“Students work really hard to gather this institutional knowledge, but the problem is you lose it all — the community loses it all as soon as they graduate,” Dorjmenchim said. “When I was invited to join along with this podcast, that was the thing I really wanted to focus on: giving the students a voice to share their knowledge, and also having alumni who graduated whose information we lost come back and institutionalize these things.”
Hong emphasized the team’s goal to use the podcast as a “database or an encyclopedia” for FGLI students to find academic resources, career-related information, and also a story that might reflect their own journey.
“I wanted to start a podcast and have something tangible that people can go to whenever they have a question,” he said. “[There are] a bunch of different resources I didn’t even know about, and I feel like that’s a really common experience.”
According to the student producers, the podcast hopes to release its first episode toward the end of this semester or early next semester. The team is currently undergoing the onboarding process and creating the basic workflow for their project. They are also working on securing funding in order to purchase podcast and sound equipment.
Hong said that there are four pillars the podcast hopes to center its episodes around. These topics include interviews with FGLI alumni and professors, speaking to current FGLI students about challenges they face, sharing resources provided by the University and student groups, and examining sociological theories behind being a FGLI student.
In terms of their long-term vision, the team is hoping to build a website with episodes so that students can input topics or themes of interest to them and search for relevant episodes recorded by The FGLI Podcast.
“Let’s say you’re an LGBT student who’s Asian American who’s also interested in a field like mechanical engineering. You’re just going to enter all of those things in [the website] and then, hopefully, further down the line as we build up our repertoire of episodes, you’ll be able to find stories that resonate with you,” Hong said.
The podcast hopes to foster community, especially among FGLI students who may not be as involved in FGLI spaces or organizations at Penn. The team is also thinking about hosting a “live podcast,” where a live audience can watch the hosts and guests converse as the podcast is recorded.
Both Hong and Dorjmenchim said that the creation of this podcast was because of their own experiences as FGLI students.
“Oftentimes, FGLI challenges aren’t brought to light. Through the podcast, [we hope to] create a space for discourse around those big challenges,” Hong said. “To make the first-[generation] low-income experience less of a lonely experience.”
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