Major: Digital Media Radio/TV/Film.
What did you do at 107.7 The Bronc?
“Everything. When I first started, I was just doing a show, and then I was the production manager for a while, and then in my senior year, I was Program Director. I started as a freshman producing Turf’s Up, which was a landscaping show, on Saturday mornings at 9 AM. Every Saturday morning, which was rough as a college student. It was really fun; I learned a lot about landscaping. We did a lot of fun things, and that was the start of the [live broadcasting] Philadelphia Flower Show. We first went to a small landscape trade show, then I was like what if we tried to go bigger? Let’s do the Flower Show. So I reached out to somebody from there when I was a sophomore, and it worked—and we kept going year after year after year. Before this we had never really done live broadcasts other than sports games and events on campus, so this was a new territory for us, and it just worked really well, so we kept doing it.”
“I would not have gotten that internship without every opportunity that John gave me.”
Jake Tuff ’15
What are you doing now?
“I am living in Miami, Florida, and I am a senior producer at Royal Caribbean, so I produce TV commercials and other marketing materials for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines. Before that, I was living in Napa, California, and I was managing the content production for a bunch of wine brands. That was pretty wild. Before that, I spent the first four years of my career as their video producer at Elvis Duran and The Morning Show. I interned at Elvis Duran for two years, starting my junior year, first semester, and they kept asking me to come back, so I spent five semesters in a row there, including the summers. After I graduated, they called me, ‘Hey, we have a job opening, but you have to start tomorrow,’ and I said, ‘OK see you tomorrow.’ And that was the start of that!”
Jake’s 107.7 Experience Leading Him Where He Is Today
“I wanted to go into TV my whole life. I wanted to go into some sort of behind-the-scenes television, and be a TV producer, and then I started doing my own radio show at 107.7 The Bronc, and I was like ‘Woah, this is really fun, like I could do this.’ I kept getting more and more involved, and John was like ‘Do you want to produce this landscaping show on Saturday mornings?’ and I was like ‘Not really but I’ll do it,’ and I didn’t stop, I spent my whole college career with John. From then on that was my place and those were my people. Every free moment I had I was at the radio station, and then I was always such a huge fan of Elvis Duran and applied for an internship there. So I kind of fell in love with radio because John forced me to.”
A Change in Career
“Going to California to work for the wine marketing company was weird; then leaving a career that I had worked so hard to build, but it just got to a point where my job wasn’t really fulfilling anymore. I was ready for a change and this opportunity in Miami with Royal Caribbean popped up, which led me to become a commercial producer. I started a month ago; I like it a lot. It’s different working for a corporate company, which is different than working in radio. Radio is fun, casual, and always evolving, where my new job is still fun, it’s just very different. I do miss radio and I had a really good time, but it was time for me to move on—but I’m still doing things that I was doing. Being a radio producer is very similar to being a video producer, because you are still doing the same tasks, using the same skills, using the same creative part of your brain to make things happen by putting the pieces together to create something really cool. So I use a lot of what I learned in the radio world in my job today.”
Biggest Take Away
“I think 107.7 The Bronc prepared me for life. I could go into any job in this field and feel comfortable because of the experience I had there. Not many people get to go to a college and have a real-life experience. John runs that place like any other commercial radio station, and that is an experience I think a lot of the higher-ups at Rider don’t even know. John makes it very clear what he does, and he is really good at what he does, but he doesn’t treat the students like they are students—it’s a student-run radio station that is a real-life experience, and he makes it just as fun, difficult, frustrating, and rewarding. You can’t get that experience at a lot of other places, and so it was super helpful to me to jump into a career right after I graduated already having worked for him.” My biggest takeaway is to treat it like it’s your full-time job. If that is what you want to do in life, take the opportunity that you have at this radio station and go for it.