Fine arts teacher Meghan O’Donnell hands over the key to the dark room for an unofficial club meeting. Week after week, this group of students, primarily freshmen, meets in the dark room to hone their scripts and their deliveries for the debut of the LHS Podcast.

This day, The Lancer Feed was there to interview them.

When people think of student media, what comes to mind is usually student publications, varsity yearbook, and other class-related activities. Late November, however, freshman Tapasya Narra decided to start, (or, technically, restart,) Lafayette’s student-led podcast club with a distinct ambition and purpose to set it up for success.

“I just thought that it would be a great way of promoting our school,” club president Tapasya Narra said.

For Narra, podcast is an important medium and one which is personally significant. 

“As a kid, I was not the best communicator. I was an introvert, could not talk to anybody, and I couldn’t connect,” Narra said. “It took me really all of middle school to gather that courage. Podcasting helped, debate helped, and small things like that really helped me connect with other people.”

 “I thought that podcasting would be a great way for introverts to just step out and be able to communicate what they want to,” Narra explained.

A lot of times during Ac Lab, students are tired and want to sleep or play games. Without due dates or teacher expectations to keep them in check during their free time, students may not always be the most motivated to participate in extracurricular activities.

Narra understood from early on that starting this club would take careful planning.

 “If you don’t have a good foundation, especially in terms of knowledge, it’s easy to fail,” Narra explained. “So I wanted to spend the majority of time on foundation before anything else.”

Even though the club is “100% student driven” as fine arts teacher Meghan O’Donnell, the club’s sponsor, puts it, it is organized and run with a clear purpose.

The club has two main roles: writers and anchors. As per their titles, writers write and research scripts while anchors speak into the microphones and interview guests.

For writers, there’s a fair amount of research involved. “Since we’re doing wrestling this month, we had to look up records for both teams,” freshman Evan Hogg said.

Anchors, meanwhile, have to work on their deliveries and speaking skills. 

“I do speech and debate, [and] whenever I usually give a speech I kind of just start yelling,” freshman Aryan Sharma, an anchor, said. “I have to control my tone, keep it a little bit quieter while also being enthusiastic.”

Anchors often come to writers with ideas to include as well, and members are quick to note that there is a lot of overlap and cooperation between the two jobs.

“It’s a lot of back and forth,” Narra, who helps as a writer, said. “We essentially write a draft… the anchors give us feedback.”

Currently, the team is working on making the script align more closely with the anchors’ personalities.

“If you’ve ever read a book out loud, you know that sometimes it doesn’t exactly flow off the tongue,” Sharma said. “So we’ve been changing around the script to make it sound more casual.”

Though the podcast club has ambitious goals, Narra understands that it is ultimately a hobby-based club. “While I do want this club to succeed, I still want anybody who’s in the team to have good grades [and] not feel stressed about putting the podcast club over grades or anything else,” she said.

“[Tapasya] is a pretty good president. She sets up meetings really well… she makes sure that most people can go to them and works out times,” Hogg said.

Right now, the club’s primary focus is on setting up the Lancercast, the “official” podcast about Lafayette.

“Once this first episode came out, I was planning on letting other team members do their own podcasts,” Narra said, noting that a gaming podcast was high on the team’s list of ideas.

The club plans to release the first episode of The Lancercast, which will talk about and interview members of other clubs, to multiple services. For the debut, they will be interviewing Lafayette’s girls’ and boys’ wrestling teams.

“I hope everyone can look forward to our episodes and our podcasts,” Narra says on her hopes for the club.

Right now, the club is getting ready to post its debut episode. They are always looking to recruit more members and recommend anybody who may be interested to join.

“I think that if anyone else would like to join podcast club that it’s a great opportunity to try,” Hogg said.

The club can be reached on its Instagram, @the_official_lancercast and on its website, https://sites.google.com/view/the-official-lancercast/home