In A Tough Job Market, Kingsborough’s Broadcasters Follow Their Dreams

It’s not easy to get a job as a DJ nowadays, but that’s not stopping the Kingsborough Community College Radio crew from chasing their dreams.

The group was recently profiled by the campus paper, and they say they’re just doing what they love best.  Take Elissa Nieves, 25, who is currently an assistant to the general manager at Kingsborough’s radio station, WKRB. Since she was 13 years old, Nieves knew she wanted to be a part of the radio industry.

“One day I was listening to the radio, and I realized that would be such a great job. That would be so much fun. I can talk on air, I get to listen to music, I get to meet people. Ever since then I fell in love with it. I decided that was what I wanted to do,” she told the paper. Nieves recently graduated Kingsborough with a broadcasting degree.

The broadcast program at Kingsborough started in 1979 under the charge of radio producer Dr. Cliff Hesse, who still runs the program today. Dr. Hesse set up the program in a way where it betters chances of landing a job in a hard field.  The program gives a wide-range of courses in broadcasting to build up more experience for the students.

“It’s pretty all-involved,” Dr. Hesse told the paper. Students “take courses that are required in every area… not just radio broadcasting but other uses of sound, which is where it’s really exploding: live sound, theatrical sound, Internet, all of these are radio elements that have now moved into other venues. Sound for video and television and film is extraordinarily complex, and we do that at the end of our sound course.”