Madison Kwiecinski 

News Editor

Mvk5945@psu.edu 

The 10th anniversary of the founding of the campus radio station, called BVZ, was on Thursday, November 11, 2021. BVZ was founded in 2011 to help students get real-life experience on the radio. Today, the radio station does many other things.

“We kind of serve as the unofficial campus DJ, we DJ all kinds of events,” said Kyle McCoy, who is the station manager at BVZ. McCoy is also an editor for the Features section at the Behrend Beacon.

There are two main ways to get involved with BVZ. One of which would be to contact Professor Deau and the other would be to reach out to Kyle McCoy using a service called FastTrack. According to McCoy, FastTrack is a service which allows students not in a communications class or major to get involved with BVZ, and allows him to manage their radio shows. Students can also reach out to Rachel Schaffner, who is the assistant station manager of BVZ, for more information on joining as well. 

BVZ covers a wide array of events and media styles, and can provide students with practical experience with broadcasting in several ways. The radio show was brought back to Behrend about 10 years ago by popular request of the student body and has been running strong for a decade now. The station not only hosts several student shows, but they are also beginning to run podcasts recorded in-house and have at least 25 different hosts this year. 

“We have had all sorts of shows on the network,” said McCoy. “We have had cooking shows, gaming shows, trivia shows, music shows, sports shows. Any type of show you can think of, we’ve had it.” 

Professor Deau explained that BVZ runs programming 24 hours a day, seven days a week. This year, they are now scheduling repeating programming, as well as implementing podcasts into BVZ. Students and local community members can come on and film a podcast as something to run on the network. In addition, they play music and host programming from NPR on the station. 

BVZ is also essentially the unofficial DJ of the Behrend campus. McCoy explained that they have been asked to DJ a variety of campus events, including welcome week, the club showcase, and several different clubs formal events. Additionally, BVZ has been the DJ for the Behrend THON event for several years, which is an event that donates money towards childhood cancer. 

BVZ has been consistently expanding, and is always trying to bring in more students to be involved. The call sign of the organization is, “The voice of Behrend” and is something they try to live up to. According to McCoy, “It gives students a voice to really express themselves, express their interests to the larger campus and larger public.” 

As BVZ celebrates their 10th anniversary and over a decade as a successful campus club, take a moment to tune in and hear some of their programming. The broadcast channel can be listened to seven days a week at all hours of the day by going to bvzradio.psu.edu.