Meet Me Afterschool

PODCAST FOR FUTURE ARTISTS & DESIGNERS

After interning at several different companies during my gap year in 2021, I realized the impact of the ‘information gap’ in creating the social gap and influencing our decision-making process.

Therefore, I co-founded Meet Me Afterschool, a student run podcast channel that help bridges the gap between school and the workplace for future designers and artists.

Role

soft skills

Hard skills

Co-Founder & Leader
Podcast Host
Leadership
Communication
Adobe Premiere
UIUX
Webflow & Coding
Mar 2021 - Now

Our Mission

Our host team interviews artists, designers, and educators who have explored iterations of life in order to find the place they want to create impact in this world.

Through casual conversations with a diverse range of storytellers, Meet Me After School explores stories, projects, and career choices that have helped artists, designs and educators discover their voice in this world.

My Role

As the co-founder and designer with leadership and product management experience, I like to raise questions and push our team to explore new ways to better serve our audience.

Leadership

  • Proposed and lead the recent major organizational change to switch platforms, update workflow, expand on target audience group, and re-branding.

  • Effectively improved workflow efficiency using Figma and Notion to reduce repetitive tasks and miscommunications.

  • Recruited 7 members on the team.

Content creation

  • Hosted/co-hosted 7 episodes

Design & UIUX

  • Prototyped, tested, designed, and coded the podcast website using Figma and Webflow

Post production

  • Edited and created ‘reader’s notes’  for 3 episodes

Progress since 2022 summer

Diversity in voice, style, and industries

To better represent a holistic perspective, we outreached for speakers in diverse industries advocating for diverse impacts and lifestyles.

We have created 11 episodes since the summer of 2022, touching on topics such as art education, working in the hybrid space of music production and design, and residing in Tibet for 128 days.

Internally, we form teams based on interest and background to better represent the styles and voices that can best narrate the guests’ stories.

Cover art and duck illustration by the amazing Kelly Zhou! <3

Past episode Highlights

“I love seeing my fellow peers being featured and acknowledge for the hard work and passion he has towards this technology.”

Comment by an architecture Student, Kennedy’s roommate.

Jin’s narrative of his internal struggles and experience at Tibet was so touching and scenic.

Comment by an illustration student’s parent.

“Rafaela gave very useful advice on career development.”

Comment by a student studying industrial design.

Challenge

Adaptation to better serve our audience.

After conducting user interviews with our target audience, we realized that our existing channels were inclusive. I proposed to brainstorm changes to better serve the international community.

old channel

new channels

WeChat: Inclusive to the mandarin-speaking community

Website: Homebase platform
Instagram: Most popular casual reading platform
Newsletter: Most popular business/career-related platform

Website buidling in-progress

Setting up instagram

Setting up newsletter

Old content strategy

new content strategy

Speaker-centered: We were incentivized to invite speakers with bigger names to gain better statistics.

Topic-centered: In the future, we would curate topics that are trending, and outreach speakers who would offer a diverse range of perspectives.

Commitment & Teamwork

We have grown from 3 members to 9 members over three months. Our team expertise ranging from the design to film production to illustration.

Our content creation team, design team, and outreach team meets every week to reflect, summarize, and adjust our workflow for better quality content and collaboration.

Next Steps

Transitioning to new platforms, new audiences, and new approaches to content, and quantifying our goal.

More community engagement.

The goal is to complete the infrastructure and have first rounds of feedback by the end of 2022.

To feature more backstage production stories of other student organizations to mutually grow and acknowledge each others’ efforts.

Reflection & Takeaways

Long-term commitment and adaptation to fluid situations

Different from a school project, a podcast is a long-term project that will be constantly receiving real feedback from the public. We benefited greatly from having a habit of reflection and commitment to adapt to new needs.