Learning From Millennials

This is a podcast by a person who’s trying to get a job making podcasts. Enter the life of an aspiring radio professional who belongs to the alternatingly lauded and reviled millennial generation. 

“Millennial” is the project of Megan Tan, who is “coming of age” and trying to make it in her twenties. That journey (sometimes a struggle) is laid bare for listeners on her show. 

In this particularly vulnerable episode, Tan takes us on a trip to New York City from her home in Portland. After interning at a podcast, RadioLab, in NYC, two years before, she went back to Portland to finish school and lost touch with the east-coast radio world. Now, she needs a job. After flinging applications into the void for too long, she makes the trek to the place she wants a job and just meets everyone she can think of who might help her.

Listening to Tan’s recordings of herself speaking to her colleagues and mentors to try and get a job doing exactly what she’s doing—recording experience—mirrors a lot of the awkwardness of this particular phase in life. You already know what you’re doing, and what you want to do, but it seems impossible to make the leap to being able to do it in a professional context.

Follow Megan Tan’s podcast for insight into a generation, or, for those who are also millennials, a bit of a roadmap – or at least some solidarity.