Introduce yourself!

Hi, my name is Kendall Frobig, I am a junior at Carmel High School and I have my own podcast at WHJE, the school’s radio station. It’s called “Girl Talk.” Girl Talk is a female empowerment podcast that focuses on boosting the confidence of the young girls in the community as well as really just picking apart social normalities. This season of Girl Talk is called “Battle of the Sexes” and it really focused on picking apart the gender normalities, controversies surrounding huge things such as the gender pay gap and athletics, men and women’s fashion. I have a crossover with several of the shows on the station and it will really be super cool, and I’m really excited for it!

In what ways has radio impacted your life? 

Radio has impacted my life in several different ways. I have made a lot of friends through radio, I’ve gotten my show, I’ve won a national award now and I was nominated for three others, at least by the station. I have found a purpose in WHJE. In a school of 5,000 kids, it’s really hard to find where you fit in and it’s really hard to find out, “what am I going to do in this giant place?” and in radio, I found that exactly. I know what I want to do, I have hopefully found a career path, and it’s been really awesome.

What inspired you to create a show?

So, every year, kids are pushed to branch out in the station and not necessarily just stick to music shows, which is a lot of what our station does because we are an alternative music genre station. But, in the podcasting department, I feel as though you have a lot more freedom to do what you want to do within the station. Now, of course, you aren’t going live, which is one of the coolest parts of radio, but you are creating something that you’re proud of. It’s really interesting to see all of the different types of shows that come from the podcast department. I mean, you’ve got my show which is about female empowerment, you’ve got crime with Will Courtney and Fox Hollow, and Emme Brown has her own crime podcast, (and) you’ve got Fashion Philosophy with Aidan Hurley. One of the coolest ones by far is Evan Sanders with his podcast that focuses on listener engagement. Basically, he’ll ask for a prompt from the audience and he’ll narrow it down and make an episode themed around it, it’s super cool. So I guess what inspired me to create my own show was my peers, honestly, because they showed me that you can do whatever you want and be proud of something like that, and it’s really cool.

What would be some tips you would give someone if they were interested in doing radio or hosting a show?

If you’re interested in joining radio, just do it, because you’ll never know if you’ll love it or you’ll hate it unless you do it. So, my advice to anyone looking forward to branching out and trying radio would definitely be to just go ahead and leap into it. That would (also apply) to hosting a show. If you’re wanting to host a live show, I would just suggest that you try it. Especially your second year of radio, you get that opportunity to branch out with student-guided and self-guided lesson planning, and that’s going to really be your chance to test out where you fit best within the station. So where do you fit in the live shows department, the social media department, the PSAs department, the podcast department? Regardless of where you end up, you’ll always have a role within radio.

Take a look at the covers of Frobig’s podcast episodes:

Gallery • 7 Photos

Submitted Photo: Kendall Frobig

How do you think having this show and winning awards will impact you in the future? Do you think this is something you would consider pursuing as a career?

Winning awards and having the show will definitely help me in terms of going to school. It will look really good on college applications, which is something that is really exciting for me. I do hope to follow in a lot of my WHJE peers’ steps and go to Ball State University. That is somewhere that a lot of our students actually end up going, and that is definitely something that I would be interested in doing. It has definitely helped me move towards what I want to do for a career, but I wouldn’t say that I am going to end up pursuing making podcasts as my career. I’ve decided that I want to go into communications, whether that be human resources or producing work like this, I don’t know quite yet. But I do think winning awards and having the show will definitely help me get to where I’m supposed to be.

Click here to listen to Frobig’s Girl Talk podcast!