The TCC Connection

The TCC Connection is the podcast feed of Tulsa Community College's student newspaper, and it carries two quite different projects under one name. The feed is easier to use once you know which is which. Connection Conversations is the newsroom's interview series, introduced on air as talks with community members, students, faculty and staff. Sam, the paper's managing editor and podcast director, leads some of them, and a host named Anna leads another. The method is simple. A guest explains how they arrived at their work, and the questions stay practical. Rhoda Smietanski, an assistant professor of American Sign Language Education, covers interpreting and the students her program draws, from adults who already hold degrees and want a new career to recent high school graduates seeking an associate's degree. She encourages every student to plan long term and to look toward transferring to a university. Dr. Paul Fuhrmeister, who normally works in an urgent care clinic, recounts volunteering on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico during the COVID-19 pandemic. He was assigned to a testing site at Shiprock Indian Hospital and spent weekends making follow-up calls alongside public health nurses. It is ground-level detail: which department, which assignment, which phone calls. Anna's conversation with Trent Gleason covers his study abroad trip to Japan, with a detour into My Hero Academia and a younger sister who rewatches it and comes away wanting to work out. Podcast for a Day runs on a different engine. Its on-air introduction explains that students in an electronic communication class during the 2022 spring semester were each tasked with making their own podcast episode. The result is a string of small shows, each with its own name and premise. In Hollywood Sunrise, best friends Shane and Breeze clink glasses, puzzle over Oscars voting as they understand it, from invitation-only membership to sponsorship by existing members, and wonder aloud whether the whole thing is rigged. Community Ties brings in longtime friend Tyler Berger to swap stories about a church community and a skate park, and closes on the idea that people usually want to talk to you as much as you want to talk to them. The episode titled Podcast for a Day - Giselle Esparza sits down with Amber Sunshine Starnes, who owns a small farm in Cleveland, Oklahoma, and a pole dance studio in Tulsa, and it makes room for doing the sport purely for enjoyment, with no pressure to compete or perform. For the newsroom side, the Navajo Nation conversation is a good first stop; for the student side at its liveliest, try Hollywood Sunrise. Taken together, the feed shows a community college from several angles at once: its teachers, its students' projects and the people around Tulsa they choose to put on air.