Step Out to Stand Out! – Journey of Podcast “Classroom Dive”
“It was hard to understand how to make ourselves feel that the day was productive considering the number of class assignments and many other responsibilities we had. And during the conversation, we realized that we hardly know our batch mates. Let me remind you that this was the time when the Pandemic was at its peak, April 2021. It was hard to interact with anyone over a call or text. And that is when Vibhor proposed the idea of starting a podcast and Harsha accepted it immediately. We were at our home which made recording the most difficult task.
On the night of April 7, 2021; after five hours of discussion, four hours on the call, three retakes, almost 25 Jai Mata Di later we launched our pilot episode and named our podcast Classroom Dive. The idea was clear, this podcast is for the students, by the students, to hear and share their experience and to let others know that we all are in this together. Classroom dive soon became a topic of discussion, and we started to get a lot of communications from students to be part of the podcast. The response was overwhelming, but our turning point was an incident that took place three weeks after we launched Classroom dive.
We were attending our personal branding class when Dr. Amit Nagpal, visiting faculty at BIMTECH, took our name and congratulated us for our work. He has been monitoring our work since he got to know about our podcast. He helped us to get in touch with many amazing podcasters including Ms. Yashika Begwani the founder of Voice of Achiever and Mr. Sriram who has been blogging for 12 years and podcasting for 3 years. They helped us understand how voice modulation works, how to lead a conversation and gave us many other tips and tricks. We started with spending 4 hours on recording and editing per episode and giving just an hour to the entire drill. The discussion with Mr. Sriram was too insightful and we decided not to keep the knowledge to ourselves and released a three-episode series named Podcast Trilogy with Sriram.
Not every student planned to pursue MBA. While one of our guests wanted to join Airforce, another guest talked about being an entrepreneur. But as the saying goes “every action has an equal and opposite reaction”. We believe that it was our previous decisions that lead all of us to BIMTECH. Our guests were Harjas, Muskan, Vishal, Latika, Anish, Ishita, Akanksha, Inchara, Yashwardhan, Ashif, Bhawini, Zeeshan, and Prashant.
We started getting recognition not just amongst the peer group but also amongst the management. We got the opportunity to release a podcast for BIMTECH on its 34th Commencement day; The one with all about BIMTECH. It was one of the most amazing experiences when BIMTECH shared our podcast in front of the new MBA aspirants and the parents.
On April 7, Classroom Dive will turn a year old and the journey has been amazing. In between all the competition and race, we found our purpose, an escape to keep us on track. We learned the art of entertaining with voice, networking, time and people management, strategic marketing, but above all we got the confidence to do what we want to. Podcasting took away all our insecurities and fear and boosted our confidence. We might have missed a lot of opportunities in our past but we are confident that now we can make opportunities for ourselves as and when needed.
