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Radio TV film students at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh were recipients of awards at two recent broadcast competitions.

On March 25, the National Broadcasting Society presented awards in their National Undergraduate Student Electronic Media Competition at their 75th annual convention in East Rutherford, New Jersey.

UW Oshkosh’s Titan TV swept the category for Video Drama Program. The Grand Prize went to the program “Polar Bear,” the story of a college student dealing with Bipolar Disorder and how it affects his relationships with friends, ex-girlfriend, and love interest. Production staff included Cliff Miller, Vaughan Turner, Anthony Montalvo, Luke Schwan, Garrett Denning, Matt Holajn, Amanda Beistle and Jacob Gruber with cast members Aaron Busse, Audrey Riechers, Kristopher Wilke, James Barnes and Lauren Patritto.

Honorable mention in this category went to the Titan TV program “Achieve It,” which takes place in a world where a person is defined by the bracelet they wear that identifies their social standing. The story provides an example of the struggles of body image young woman face and the lengths they will go just to fit in. Production staff was Lisa Donner, Andrew Trainor, Luke Stevens, Amanda Cartwright, Meghan Kelsey, Geoff Pritzl, Alex Ovadal, Justin Neitzel, Natalie Schuster, Ben Alden, Taylor Mueller, Pat Stevens, Ryan Taylor, Sunghee Park, Kenyen Butler, Matt Hendrickson, Renee Rush, Trevor Chase, Alden Frautschy and Miles Morkri with cast members Andrea Ewald, Max Wannow, Ryan Knuteson, Sabine Johanna Perry, David Kurtz, Lisa Donner, Geoff Pritzl and Vaughn Turner.

In the category for Audio Public Affairs/Interview program, UW Oshkosh’s WRST-FM took the Grand Prize for a long form radio interview about the Flint Water Crisis conducted by former student news director Mariah Tralongo.  The interview subject was a student reporter at the Michigan State University campus radio station who has been doing original reporting and blogging on the crisis.  The segment aired as part of WRST’s weekly newsmagazine “Week In Review.”

A total of 100 awards were given in the competition and were shared among 50 universities and colleges. With these honors, UW Oshkosh has now won 165 national production awards from NBS.

On April 1, the Midwest Broadcast Journalists Association presented their awards at the Midwest Journalism Conference in Bloomington, Minnesota. These awards cover a six-state region and are named in honor of Eric Sevaried, the longtime CBS News reporter and commentator. UW Oshkosh’s WRST received six of the 28 awards going to student radio productions.

In the radio category for Talk/Public Affairs, WRST won first place for a live interview conducted by student news director Taylor Erhmann about the UWO Tribal Powwow. An Award of Merit in this category went to former student news director Mariah Tralongo for an interview about bystander intervention.

WRST also took the first place award in the category for soft feature. It went to student producer Thomas Hawthorne for his humorous segment called “Wisconsinisms,” about words and phrases peculiar to Wisconsin.  The station also won an Award of Merit in the hard feature category for Tricia Slottke’s piece called “Creating a Peer Group” in which she describes her unique experience in finding a network of friends completely online.  Both feature segments were created for UWO’s Advanced Radio Production class.

WRST also got Award of Merit honors in two sports categories, both shared by student sports director Hunter Magdanz and sports producer Max McGilligan. In the radio category for sportscast/program, the award went to WRST’s weekly sports talk/interview program “The Sports Page” and in the radio category for sports play-by-play, the live football broadcast between UW Oshkosh and John Carroll University got the nod.

Thus far this academic year, UW Oshkosh Radio TV film students have won 24 state, regional and national awards.

Faculty, staff and students are encouraged to contribute calendar items, campus announcements and other good news to UW Oshkosh Today.