When students want to listen to music or tune in to their favorite podcasts, they might first turn to streaming services like Apple Music or Spotify. But another option for Dartmouth students lies on the third floor of Robinson Hall — the Web Dartmouth College Radio station, a hidden gem from which students host radio talk shows and stream their curated playlists. According to the organization’s website, WebDCR is Dartmouth’s freeform, online and student-run radio station. The organization, which occupies a unique niche in Dartmouth’s media landscape, has undergone numerous changes throughout its history — most notably, the College sold its FM station to WFRD, a commercial radio station in Hanover, in 2021. Since then, WebDCR transitioned to exclusively online broadcasting.
To better understand the role the station plays at Dartmouth, we spoke to current and former members of the WebDCR directorate, as well as several students who host shows. Former WebDCR general manager V Quidore ’24 said the directorate — which is currently composed of 16 students — is the “governing body and operating nexus” of the station.
“The directorate is responsible for laying the logistics and groundwork to keep the lights on,” Quidore said. “We’re also trying to make sure that we are updating and creating new policies as needed.”
Some WebDCR members joined the directorate due to an interest in music, including general manager Grant Foley ’25. Foley, a music major and performer, said he felt that WebDCR would help him pursue an audio- or music-related career after college.
“My sophomore year, I was looking for ways to get involved in all of the audio, sound and music life on campus,” Foley said. “I knew that a lot of my friends had [WebDCR] shows, so I came to a meeting … Then, [I] got involved with tech, and now I’m on the directorate this year.”
General manager Antonio Jorge Medeiros Batista Silva ’25, who joined the station as a freshman, said his passion for the organization, which motivated him to serve on the directorate, has grown throughout his Dartmouth career.
“It’s very easy to fall in love with WebDCR and the station,” Silva said. “I got involved with WebDCR during my freshman fall … and by the end of [that] year, I applied to be chief editor of WebDCR’s blog, so I got to be a member of the directorate.”
Directorate members have retained their passion for WebDCR despite having to solve many technological problems on their own — a result of their status as a student-run organization.
“Stuff breaks … that’s one of the biggest challenges,” Foley said. “People who are in here day in and day out aren’t often on directorate. If something breaks, they don’t always know how to fix it. The system can be pretty complicated sometimes, and unless you’ve seen the problem before you have to get creative.”
Though most challenges are solved by students, WebDCR has a professional engineer who helps them if they “really get stuck,” Quidore said. The organization also has access to people in the Upper Valley radio community who provide them with technological support to tackle problems too complex for students to handle alone, according to Quidore.
WebDCR also grapples with the lingering effects of the pandemic, Quidore said. Since the Class of 2024 was primarily online during their freshman year, many current seniors were not able to learn how to address technological issues or other challenges directly from past students.
“We lost a lot of institutional memory over the course of the pandemic,” Quidore said. “The past few years we’ve been figuring out how to get some of that back while also building something new.”
As WebDCR regains its footing post-pandemic, it continues to give students space to express themselves through radio — whatever their motivation.
“It can be a consequence-free space to practice actual media production, whether you have a show or a podcast,” Foley said. “For people interested in media, it’s such an awesome space for them, whether they’re taking it super seriously or [treating it as] some fun thing to do with friends every week.”
Limited media opportunities in the Upper Valley, according to Quidore, also can make radio appealing to students. Radio can give students experience to leverage when applying to jobs in the media world, they said.
“The Upper Valley is a weird sort of media space,” they said. “At Dartmouth, we don’t have a television program, so radio is the broadcast thing that [students] have.”
While some students get involved with WebDCR to gain media experience, personal passion drives other students to create shows. Stephanie Lee ’24, who has co-hosted the “Bear With Us” radio show with Emily Gao ’24 since the winter of 2024, said she was inspired to launch her own show because of a podcast.
“We are both super avid fans of podcasts and comedy podcasts, in particular standup comedians and their podcasts,” Lee said. “I’ve been listening to [comedy podcast] 2 Bears, 1 Cave since they started … I got [Emily] hooked. We found out Dartmouth does radio shows and [knew] this was a perfect opportunity for us.”
Trudy Silver ’26, who created the show “Whine and Cheese” with her friend Corinne Fischer ’26, said she was introduced to WebDCR through more conventional means — the annual fall club fair. Although Silver said she was still “kind of signing up for everything” at that point in her freshman year, her show at WebDCR has been one of the activities she has stuck with and “loved.”
“I think one of the things that’s really nice about radio is that you can really make it what you want it to be,” she said. “It’s a very fun thing in my life and, even though it’s an extracurricular, it doesn’t feel like a responsibility.”
Lee said she values her show’s “lighthearted” nature, as well as the opportunity to pause and talk to Gao during a structured time slot — no matter how busy their weeks might be.
“It’s just a free-flowing conversation, but we do think of things we want to talk about ahead of time,” Lee said. “Even though I live with Emily and talk to her all the time, it’s so nice to have a specific time to come together and make each other laugh.”
Similarly, Silver said she and her co-host Fischer were motivated to create a show because it seemed like a lighthearted way to get to know each other after meeting the summer before their freshman fall.
“I’m now really close friends with [Fischer],” Silver said. “We just feel like [our show] is a chance to spend time together more than anything.”
This community-centered spirit is something that Silva said he hopes to preserve within the organization as they work to build a larger audience at Dartmouth.
“My biggest goal is being able to walk through Novack and see on someone’s computer that they’re listening to my shows,” Silva said. “I want radio to be a part of student life as much as possible.”
