My name is Lily T. and I’m a junior at Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School. I was born and raised in Anchorage, Alaska all my life. My family is from Thailand and we are Hmong. Some tidbits about me is that I like reading and watching movies. I also highly value family and honesty. I was one of the participants for a past workshop and my podcast from then was called, “First Generation Americans“. First generation Americans are the children born from immigrant families on American soil. I documented some of their experiences they had with their American identity and the expectations of their families. I decided to pursue this topic because as a first generation American I was curious of any overlapping experiences. I was quite excited when I was offered a position as a TA this time around! 

Contrasting from how my course went, we had lots of guest speakers this time. Many were affiliated with See Stories or the podcasting world. The guest speakers helped manystudents to polish their topics and interview questions. There was, without fail, a guest speaker every week. The most exciting part about working with this project was the topics that our course had. From Connections in Life, to Thoughts about the Schools System and Young Immigrants in the USA. The topics this time around were mainly focused on school and probably was like that because the majority of students were freshmans and seniors. There were also a couple of returning students as well and the class was also smaller. Two students chose to film instead of podcasting and that was interesting to witness because they were aiding each other in each of their filming processes and designated one TA to be their cameraman. I was able to take a peek into their filming process and was delighted to see how serious they were; trying to get the right angles, lighting, and how they were planning out the scene. 

Last time I was in this course, we didn’t have the same equipment as this time, which are the microphones, soundboard and headphones- all the professional stuff. It felt entirely different with the setup and motivated the students to go beyond. There were three TAs in this workshop and because I wasn’t as tech savvy as the rest of them, I took on more of the clerical work, which I preferred, such as; managing paperwork, completing menial tasks, setting things up, taking pictures and uploading them into the gallery. As TAs we check in on the podcasters and their progress. When our instructor had gone away for a week and a sub was filling in, it made us pretty nervous. As TAs we had to step up to assist our sub into settling in, and it went great She helped the podcasters get over their editing slump and provided resources for the students to add some music and sound effects which caused a bit of a fun racket. It did motivate them again since everyone was feeling a bit of pressure to finish editing in time.

 I am so thankful for this opportunity would like to express my sincerest gratitude for Ms. Marie and Mrs. Liland for allowing me to be a part of See Stories’ workshop again!

Lily is one of our Spring interns and a former participant for the podcasting at Bettye Davis East Anchorage High School after school workshop, led by Mrs. Kim Liland. You can find out more about this workshop here and catch up on all our interns takeover posts on our Instagram page and on Facebook. Thanks to the National Endowment for the arts for funding the Cultures, Careers, and Communities Podcasting Workshop at East and West Anchorage High School. Thank you to Lily for stretching out of your comfort zone and for all of your work! Stay tuned for more stories from our interns from this workshop, featured here on our website this week!