Rebel Radio wins national student radio award

Our own student radio station, Rebel Radio, won an award at the I Love Student Radio Awards after a team of specialist judges picked it for having the Best Training Initiative.

Over 150 nominations were entered for the nine categories but Rebel Radio was the one acknowledged for its dedication in training producers and presenters and helping build skills for future careers.

Lauren Moore, Rebel Radio’s Head of Radio, accepted the award and expressed her initial shock at winning. “I know we have worked incredibly hard but I thought, against all those stations, ours wouldn’t come out on top. I didn’t even have a speech prepared, which was scary, but we made it work and I was very proud of the whole station.”

Rebel is the student media brand at Essex. Students can become involved by either becoming a part of its four sections (radio, video, editorial and marketing) or signing up for a free membership.

“I was quite shy when I came here in my first year,” added third year student Lauren. “I slowly worked my way up from Head of News and Interviews and am now the Head of Radio. It has led on to me presenting sports on the BBC - people will notice you more if you are doing radio shows and posting clips of them.”

Lauren explained how the team behind Rebel Radio gave up their weekends to set up training days and weekly workshops in order to train presenters and producers.

“We run so many different things and I think because we have worked so hard and taken the time out, we managed to beat the other stations at the awards. We stood out but I didn’t realise how hard we had worked in comparison to other stations,” she added.

“Last year, the previous Head of Radio won the first award for the station, which was a huge surprise. This year, we were nominated for two awards. Compared to other stations, ours is a lot smaller. There are huge stations in the SRA and we were one of the smaller names. Because we got two mentions this year, hopefully we will keep increasing the awards as much as we can.”

This article was written by Multimedia Journalism student Jess Clayton-Berry while on work experience in the University of Essex Communications Office.