Oscar Durand

Position »

General Manager, WITR

Year and Major »

Fourth year, Information Technology

Reason for Nomination »

Organized WITR’s $38,000 upgrade, making it the most technologically advanced radio station in Rochester. Also dramatically increased listenership.

So what got you into radio?
Michelle Comeau [a third year Psychology major] got me into radio. That’s pretty much it. She was a member and she encouraged me to join.

What does Michelle do now?
She’s actually the General Manager now because I’m graduating, so she’s taking over my job. But I was the General Manager for the last year.

Have you been on air?
Yes, I’ve hosted an array of radio shows. I have a few that I’m on every week. We have a talk show every Wednesday night about technology that I started [called Bad Radio]...It was on the air previously and it had gone off the air because people graduated. We brought it back in the beginning of fall quarter with the help of some friends. In the beginning of this quarter, I gave up hosting it because it was too time-consuming with the upgrade and everything, but I’m still on the show every week. Friday nights, I host an electronic hits show with EDM [Electronic Dance Music] club. They provide the DJ talent and I provide the on-air personality, I guess.

WITR just had a huge upgrade, any random mishaps?
Oh God, yeah. I mean like it took us like two weeks...we weren’t able to have DJs broadcasting. We have an automation system that’s on the air when there’s no physical person in the studio, and that was on the air for two weeks. The biggest problem we had was the company we had purchased things through had some kind of mishap with the shipping details and things came a week later than intended.

We had a whole week of painting and preparing for things to arrive. A lot of people got really messy when we were painting because we had the members painting, and when radio station members get cooped up in a small room things tend to, uh, get weird. Not to mention we were underground with no light...like, ever. No ventilation either.

Yeah, it was difficult. I mean, we were probably putting in like 25 to 30 hours a week in addition to actual school work...but we pulled it off. I’m proud to say that we probably have the most technologically advanced radio station in Rochester, so it was worth it.

I heard that you guys got 200 wires down to 50 with the upgrade.
I’d say that it was even less than that. We had about 200 to 250 normal audio cables, where it travels like audio. We reduced it to like 25 computer networking cables so that the audio is sort of converted into a digital signal and then sent over the wires to the other equipment around the radio station. That sort of thing.

Craig Ceremuga, General Manager, and Jarret Whetstone, Engineering Director, upgraded WITR's infrastructure.
Oscar Durand

How did you get the budget for the project approved?
It was a combination of me and our engineering director coming up with a proposal for the new equipment. And then it was brought before the Student Government Budget Committee or the Finance Committee or whatever and they approved it. Then it went higher up in the RIT administration, they all had to approve of it. Also, part of it came out of our budget and part of it came from generous donations from other departments in the university.

How hard was it to get the budget approved?
The process was long and complicated, but it wasn’t really as difficult as we imagined it to be because the upgrade was something that needed to happen. The station was literally falling apart after like 15 years of wiring — and then, like it was originally, it was done by students, so it wasn’t professionally installed or anything. So, after time things degrade and technology falls apart. It was a bit easier by the fact that it was a necessary upgrade and it wasn’t just some ridiculous idea that we had. It was a necessity, really.

Who’s your favorite band of the moment?
This is very difficult because we get like 100 to 150 CDs a week here. So we hear a lot, a lot of music. Really, I’d say M83 is my current favorite. The new album is really good. It came out a few weeks ago. We tend to play music that you don’t hear on other stations. That’s our goal, at least.