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I was in my final stretch of college, during the height of the pandemic. I was holed up in my house in Colorado Springs, Colo., doing homework at the dining room table, when my phone rang. NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo was on the line, calling to tell me I had won the 2021 College Podcast Challenge.
It sounds dramatic, but that phone call changed my life. Winning the challenge helped land me my first job in radio at KNKX, an NPR member station in Seattle. Now, I'm a freelance journalist, working on the next season of Inheriting, from LAist and NPR. I've reported stories all over — from Owens Valley, Calif., to New York City — and have met some unforgettable people along the way.
Five years later, as the annual contest returns for another round, I reached out to a few other past participants to see if their lives changed as much as mine.
Reconnecting with family
Miriam Colvin was a freshman at Penn State University in 2021 when she became one of two winners in the inaugural College Podcast Challenge. In her podcast, she dove into family lore about a fateful boxing match between her grandpa's friend and a teenage Muhammad Ali — or Cassius Clay as he was known back then.
Winning gave her the courage to pursue a career in stand-up comedy and playwriting. Over the years, Colvin has found herself returning to the elders in her life for creative inspiration. She loves hearing her grandpa talk about his childhood in Indiana, which he spent climbing bridges, catching birds and driving the family car around at 11 years old.
"These stories remind me we need to be out living, doing adventurous stuff with our loved ones, with our friends," she says.
As Colvin has grown up, her grandparents' stories have also taken on more meaning for her. Even though the world they grew up in feels unfamiliar, she's come to recognize parts of herself in these stories.
"As you get older, you kind of realize that we're all doing the same thing, and we all went through challenges and had growing pains."
For Bunmi Omisore, the struggle was not just to preserve family stories, but to understand them in the first place. Her podcast, which received an honorable mention in 2025, documented the early stages of her journey to learn her parents' native language, Yoruba.
" While it's very easy for me to be like, 'Well, my parents didn't teach me, so they can't be mad that I don't understand,' it's like, they still speak the language," she explains. "I'm the only person who loses out by deciding not to learn."
After making the podcast, Omisore, a senior at Duke University at the time, got serious about learning. Her father started speaking to her only in Yoruba over the phone. Her copy of Beginner's Yoruba became water-stained and covered in pencil marks. A year later, all that hard work has paid off.
"If you were to tell me two years ago, that I would be able to understand my parents only speaking Yoruba, I'll admit it, I would not have believed you."
For Omisore, the most rewarding part has been gaining access to a deeper understanding of her Nigerian family. There's a video of her grandmother she remembers seeing growing up, where her grandmother is speaking in Yoruba while playing with her goats. Now, she can hear that her grandmother is cracking jokes about the goats, pretending they're her pet dogs.
"She had a sense of humor, she had wit, all these things that I was not able to embrace because I didn't know the language," Omisore says. "It humanized a woman that I had known that I had come from, but I hadn't really been able to understand."
A step closer to a dream career
Bennett Cook is not just a transit enthusiast — he prefers the term transitologist. He entered the College Podcast Challenge in 2021, as a student at Buffalo State University, with a story about the unexpected music subway trains make.
Hearing that music is "very rare," Cook says. "You'd have to really turn to your sixth sense." But, he says, if you listen closely, the train's machinery might evoke the sound of cellos, or even a violin, as it departs a station.
Cook says that being named a finalist in the competition fueled his drive to pursue his passion as a career.
He got a job with the Chicago Transit Authority earlier this year, making the move hundreds of miles away from his home in New York City. Now he spends his days as a customer service assistant, helping others navigate the transit system, which he already knows by heart.
Cook hasn't stopped dreaming — he wants to become the person operating the trains, and he has big ideas about how Chicago can expand its transit system that he hopes he can put into motion someday.
The College Podcast Challenge also launched Jo Strogatz into her dream job. In 2024, she was a student at Salt Institute for Documentary Studies in Maine when she won the contest. Her story featured her own original music and an interview with a friend, who is in his 60s, and who has never had a romantic relationship before.
Strogatz works at Radiolab now, a role she believes she never would've landed without the contest.
"I can't believe that I'm so lucky to have this opportunity to be at a place where I can do science and storytelling and learn from people every day," she says.
Edited by: Janet Woojeong Lee and Nirvi Shah
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