Sophia Wrobel ‘24 earned an honorable mention in NPR’s Student Podcast Challenge for her entry, The Perfect Romance Novel. The annual contest invites students to create podcasts and compete for a chance to have their stories featured on NPR.
Sophia has been developing podcasts for several years. She says they helped serve as outlets for her writing and acting talents during COVID, and they helped her process the chaos brought on by the pandemic.
Last year, her mother, who listens to NPR, introduced her to a podcast challenge they were having. With scholarship opportunities on the radar, Sophia says, “I added it to my list. I had some scripts that I had started but forgot to finish, so I picked a random one and added to it. I tried to stray away from heavy or deep topics because I had a feeling many of those kinds of stories would be submitted. I decided to start with a basic cooking show format but make it a novel instead.”
Sophia says she hadn’t expected an “off the top of my head” podcast to do so well. It took her about five hours to create since she had to record it many times because “my brain tends to move faster than my mouth.”
History Department Chair Karen Glenn, Sophia’s teacher and adviser, acted as her sponsor for the NPR competition, helping her upload the podcast and serving as her teacher contact.
