Wow, the past 2 years really flew by. I joined K-UTE in May 2018, fresh off my graduation from Salt Lake Community College. Continuing my education at the University of Utah and gaining more involvement in radio after my time at Radio SLCC were important to me. The first table I went up to at my orientation was the Student Media table. I asked how I could get involved and the rest is history. These two years were some of the best of my life so far and some that I will without a doubt cherish. Here’s a little more about my journey at K-UTE.

2018-2019

When I first joined the station, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do. I knew I wanted to do some DJing but I didn’t know what else. Shortly after beginning my DJing in summer 2018, I learned about our website and blog section. I began writing for our blog in August 2018, with my Astroworld album review as my first post. To this day, that post is still one of my favorites and personal best that I ever wrote. It got praise from my peers as well as people in my personal life. I knew then that I wanted to continue keeping this ball rolling with the blog. 

As the 2018-2019 school year went on, I continued to keep myself involved. I wrote nearly 40 posts in that first year and DJ’d my show nearly every week. I made strong connections with my show, the Hip Hop Drip, and others from K-UTE. Near the end of the year, I was approached by higher-ups in K-UTE and encouraged to apply for a leadership position. I did so and was awarded the Hip-Hop/EDM Genre Producer position for the 2019-2020 school year. I didn’t expect this but I was very grateful to continue my involvement for K-UTE in a higher capacity than before. At that point, I was just known as a blog writer but I aspired to be more.

2019-2020

I’ll be honest here: the 2019-2020 school year began and the stress of the new position got to me early. There was a moment where I wanted to resign before the year began because I thought that I couldn’t do my job correctly and give it enough time and commitment. Luckily, I was able to have a meeting with my brilliant colleagues and they instilled their confidence in me and told me I could do it. I’m very grateful that we had that discussion because without it I would have resigned my position and the year would have been very different. 

The 2019-20 school year was without a doubt my favorite of any student media that I’ve ever been a part of. I had so much personal and professional growth and made many connections with people that I’m proud to call friends. The Hip-Hop/EDM Genre Director Tyki Rose and I made an amazing team and cultivated a very effective and hard-working staff. This year was beyond special and I’m proud to have been a part of it.

The most special thing about this year was the involvement and closeness of us at the Hip Hop Drip. The previous year was fun and I learned a lot, but it was missing this sense of closeness that we found this year. This year, we had a staff that was composed of nearly all new students to the U, with some returning students, and we were able to make something special happen for the whole year. We put out so much blog content, live content, event content, and even created the popular Drip Boys podcast series. We are a tight-knit group that turned out better than I could have ever hoped for. This experience has made me a better person and an even bigger music lover than I was before.

At the conclusion of my K-UTE career, I wrote more than 80 blog posts for the site. I wrote content ranging from album reviews, album previews, artist spotlights, interview recaps, song reviews, monthly recaps, and much more. You can read through the entire collection of my posts at this link if you are interested. I also DJ’d nearly every week until the Coronavirus pandemic began. I contributed to live events, tabling events, interviews, and podcasts. K-UTE was an absolute blast and I’m so glad that I got to spend this time here.   

What’s next?

While my career at K-UTE is over, my love and support for the station is not. I’ll continue following, reading, and sharing the new content on the website and social media platforms. I’m graduating with my BS in Communication and planning to work in marketing while doing some blog writing. My dream goal is to start a music blog and market it myself. In the near future, I plan to start my own hip hop blog and continue creating dope content. I’ll post more information about that on my Instagram as it becomes available. In the meantime, follow me on Instagram @youngthuggamanekyle to keep up with my endeavors.   

From the bottom of my heart, I want to say thank you to everyone at University of Utah Student Media who helped me find success and have the time of my life. Even though I can’t do it in person due to the current pandemic, I want to extend a personal thank you to Jake Sorensen, Tyki Rose, Martyn Duniho, Jackson Card, Adam Proffit, Jameson Williams, Roberto Elguera, Max McGill, and Joseph Moss. There are probably some that I forgot to mention but even if I didn’t mention you, just know that you made my experience at K-UTE one of a kind and I appreciate you. 

Until next time, this is your boy Kyle signing off for K-UTE Radio.