In producing a podcast for her Miami Dade College writing class, Isabel Paz opened with a dramatic emotional voicemail she left her mother years ago about an active shooter lockdown at her high school, Doral Prepatory Academy.
Through tears and confusion, you can hear Paz comforting her mother’s fears by telling her she is safe.
" I wanted to call to let you know that I'm okay," Paz says in the podcast. "I know you're probably worried. Just stay where you are, okay? And I promise it's gonna be okay. I just wanna call to let you know that I love you."
It was hard for Paz to relive the emotion and fear she felt that day in her high school as a teenager, but she thought it was the right choice — and said it “sets the tone of the entire podcast.”
READ MORE: Meet the Miami Dade College students making some of the best college podcasts in the country
Paz’s podcast project, When Faced with the Barrel of a Gun, is now a finalist for the prestigious NPR College Podcast Challenge.
“I did not at all expect to actually be selected,” said Paz. “So when I got the news, I was so surprised and so overjoyed.”
In her lockdown experience, authorities never found a suspect on site and eventually cleared the school, but the scare stuck with Paz. And it was not an isolated incident in her life.
Last year, Paz got a phone call from a friend who told her of a suspected active shooter at Dolphin Mall in Doral. Videos of terrified shoppers and reports of gunshots fired circulated on social media.
Paz panicked because one of her friends worked at the popular mall and her younger sister was there shopping. It would turn out to be a false alarm.
Police would later confirm that there was no evidence of a shooting, and Paz’s sister was unharmed in the chaos of fleeing shoppers.
“She's like me, she copes with humor, so she was cracking jokes,” said Paz. “They had escorted everybody who's inside the mall and they'd taken them through the back areas, so she was like, ‘I got to see the backstage of all the stores.’”
In the podcast, Paz includes the Dolphin Mall incident to show just how normalized gun violence has become in the U.S., especially for younger generations. As they’ve grown older — the number of gun violence incidents has also grown.
“It's really like an all-encompassing fear that can grip your life and totally take control of it if you don't try to calm down and actually try to rationalize your way through it,” said Paz.
She added that one way to rationalize it is through humor, which Paz and her high school classmates were good at. That point is mentioned in her podcast in one gripping line Paz narrates.
“We’d throw around jokes and laugh to cover up the seriousness of the matter, because it hasn’t changed.”
MDC stands strong in NPR competition
Miami Dade College is not new to the NPR College Podcast Challenge. Last year, two MDC students were finalists, and one of them was even named the winner of the national contest.
Paz’s professor, Emily Sendin, has been the driving factor.
“Even right before I turned it in, she's like, ‘wait, wait, maybe you should just change this one little thing,’” said Paz. “She's so good about that, about finding ways for you to improve.”
Sendin’s persistence and love for podcasting is what led to the launch of MDC’s first student-led podcast platform at Kendall Campus last year, called StoryBytes.
Paz serves as its president, while last year’s NPR College Podcast Challenge winner, Michael Vargas Arango, serves as its vice president.
“She's really good at encouraging her students to pursue stories that they're passionate about,” said Paz. “She's really such a great professor in that sense.”
You can listen to Paz’s podcast here.
