During his first week at Carnegie Mellon as a freshman majoring in painting, Amos Levy walked by Purnell and saw a few people under a tent playing music and handling some turntables. It was 88.3 WRCT, Radio Carnegie Tech, broadcasting from the lawn. A self-proclaimed music geek, Levy couldn't help but stop to chat. The DJs were friendly, and before he knew it, Levy was forgetting his next class and racing back to his dorm room to get some of his records. By the afternoon, he was standing under the tent with the guys, spinning records to a crowd of gathering students. A year later, under the moniker DJ Thermos, Levy had his own show on the Carnegie Mellon station, and since that time he been training new DJs and directing programs to bring music education into the surrounding Pittsburgh communities.
"Artists, musicians, engineers, students, community members—WRCT is one of the few places on campus that really brings all these different groups together," explains Levy (A'07), who is still on the air every Monday night while working days as the outreach program coordinator to Arts Greenhouse Program at the university's Center for the Arts in Society.
In 2005, two years after Levy's first encounter with the station, another freshman, Matt Siko, had also fallen under the station's spell. Siko wasn't a music geek, but was instead, in his words, "an engineering nerd." Majoring in materials science, he was a quintessential tech-head, and although he had no particular interest in radio, he liked playing around with equipment. He heard a few of his friends talk up the station, and he decided to head over to the studios in the basement of the University Center "because there was a lot of cool gear I wanted to check out." A few years later, he was almost single-handedly keeping the place running as the production director. WRCT has no paid staff, so maintenance and upkeep are done by Siko and other students. "The practical engineering experience you get here, you could never get in a classroom," he says. "Because at the end of the day, the radio station has to turn on."
Ever since a group of engineering students, tinkering with vacuum tubes, made the first broadcast in 1949, WRCT has continued to turn on, pulsed with a small but dedicated collection of students and amateur enthusiasts. Thanks to those volunteer efforts, WRCT is celebrating its 60th year on the air.
—Bradley A. Porter (HS'08)
