I will forever be grateful for podcasts. They’ve taught me so much, and I am so happy I stumbled upon them. One of the things that stressed me out when I was choosing what I was going to study in university was the idea that I would be confined to only the subjects that I was going to study. I wanted to have a broad general knowledge, and I was curious about a lot of different subjects that there were courses about, but I was limited by the number of courses that I could take, the time I had, and the uncertainty of my continuing interest in a subject. I was afraid that if I chose only a few courses, then I wouldn’t be able to learn anything more about other subjects. It became even more stressful for me when I started getting swamped with a lot of course readings for the courses that I did choose, and I started getting a kind of FOMO for the courses that I didn’t take, especially when I spoke to some of my friends about the different courses that they took. It wasn’t that I hated what I took, but that I was getting so saturated with only content from that subject that I didn’t even have time to do read anything else.
When I discovered podcasts, however, it opened a whole other dimension of learning for me. Podcasts like Freakonomics, Planet Money, 99% Invisible, How Stuff Works and Fresh Air, allowed me to learn so much outside what I was learning in university, and I was able to listen to them on my commute to school, or when I was doing chores. At the time of me finding podcasts, it became a way of having a world outside of school.