"Off the Cuff" Podcast
Breaking Down Barriers to Faculty Mentorship Through Long-Form Audio Storytelling
Role
Lead Producer
Industry
Media Production
Duration
2 Weeks
The Project - Listen to Episode 01 —> Here
Higher education often creates an artificial barrier between students and faculty, reducing professors to syllabus enforcers and letter grades rather than accessible career mentors. For undergraduate business students, your network is everything. Faculty, peers, and mentors are an often overlooked building block of this early network.
So, in my final semester at CU Boulder, I partnered with a peer and associate chair of marketing, Meg Winter, to launch "Off the Cuff"—a student-led podcast initiative designed to bridge this divide and foster network building relationships between students and professors.
The objective was to take professors outside the rigid academic lecture format and engage them in personal, candid conversations about their career pivots, commercial failures, and the messy realities of the world outside the walls of the CU Boulder campus. With the podcast, we wanted professors to feel comfortable sharing with their students, and for students to be just as comfortable with seeing their professors not just as teachers, but as mentors of the craft and voices to lean on as they work towards launching their career.
The Strategic & Technical Challenge
The project served as both a technical build and an editorial experiment:
The Hardware Curve: Stepping into an unfamiliar physical studio setup, I took an audio mixer board and multi-mic hardware and mastered the recording workflow on the fly to capture broadcast-ready multi-track audio.
The Editorial Pivot: While we initially captured simultaneous video and audio, technical constraints and pacing led us to make a deliberate, quality-first pivot to a dedicated audio format.
The 60-to-20 Narrative Edit: Our pilot session produced an hour of loose, unstructured dialogue. My core challenge was taking that 60-minute raw capture into Hindenburg (leveraging AI-assisted audio cleanup tools) and carving it into a tight, 20-minute proof-of-concept that moved with natural rhythm and clarity without sacrificing conversational intimacy.
Timing was everything on this project as well, with most of the pre-production happening just before spring break, and post-production concluding 3 days before graduation. I had to think fast, learn on the fly, and fix mistakes as they happened to ensure a polished episode was ready to share.
The Pilot: Featuring Professor Meg Winter
For Episode 01, we sat down with Associate Teaching Professor Meg Winter (Buyer Behavior & Market Research). Rather than discussing coursework, the episode uncovers the human story behind the resume and the journey to teaching:
The Engineering-to-Marketing Pivot: Discovering at her first engineering job that product specs, pricing, and features were decided by the marketing department, prompting an emergency two-week GMAT pivot to business school.
The WhiteWave / Danone Foundation: Reframing CPG brand management as a holistic general management discipline grounded in P&L ownership, cross-functional collaboration, and learning through failure.
Resilience & Calling: Candidly detailing her previous health battles, which forced a career pause and ultimately led her to discover her passion for teaching.
The Power of Peer Networking: Unpacking her philosophy on "warm calling," vulnerability, and why building a genuine network among classmates matters years before you think you need it.
Impact & Stakeholder Reception
Delivered during the high-pressure crunch the week of final exams, the pilot received immediate praise from our faculty partner, Meg:
"The music and editing are awesome! I can’t believe you were doing this the week before finals!!! So glad you kept the Red Bull infusions in. You both have such great voices for podcasting!"
— Meg Winter, Associate Teaching Professor of Marketing
The proof-of-concept validated the core premise: students actively crave relatable faculty perspectives to demystify corporate career paths. Telling stories is a natural part of teaching, but often due to time constraints lesson plans become more about content and less about the stories that inform the academic theory. Here, we were able to give the stories and the human behind them a platform to bridge the gap.
By establishing the editorial rhythm, audio branding, and interview blueprint upfront, the project created a sustainable foundation that my co-host carried forward in Fall 2026.
Skills utilized: Audio Mixing, Video editing, Hindenburg Podcasting Suite, Project Management, Google Gemini
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