West Texas A&M University’s (WT) radio station, KWTS, along with students from advanced media production, attended the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System’s (IBS) 2026 conference in New York City, Feb. 18 through Feb. 22. The group consisted of eight students, one staff member, and two faculty members.
According to their website, IBS “is an organization that supports both college and high school media outlets and organizations… Each year, the IBS Media Awards are handed out at their annual conference to its member stations. This year, more than 3,000 entries were submitted from 100-plus schools across the country and the globe.”
Out of the thousands of entries, KWTS submitted 32 projects, was nominated for nine projects, and won Best Station Promo for the Ryan Hazlewood Hall of Fame video.
Director of Broadcast Engineering and Senior Lecturer of Media Communication, Randy Ray shared about his involvement in the organization.
“This is my fourth one [to attend],” Ray said. “I think I’ve been to a couple of them without students… But this one has some stuff that I wanted to share with the students. Everyone needs to go to New York at least once.”
Ray continued by explaining how the conference enhances students’ education.
“I love it when we can take students to conferences like this,” Ray said. “They get to see what’s going on in the industry, and they get to hear from professionals other than us. And it kind of reinforces what we’re teaching them in class already.”
Senior digital communication and media major, Mindy Self explained how the conference schedule ran.
“We went to different breakout sessions,” Self said. “We were able to go as a group, but we usually [would] just pick and choose which ones we want to go to and which ones interested us. Sessions started at 9:30, going until about 4:30, and then our awards [were presented] at 5:00. And that took about an hour.”
Program Director of KWTS and senior majoring in digital communication and media, Tate Maxwell shared what he learned during the conference.
“The conference had a lot of different seminars,” Maxwell said. ”Most of them were mainly focused around radio things. A couple of things I went to was about hip hop and R&B programming on the radio, which is pretty cool to do. Another one was about programming in general, which I thought would be helpful because my job is to program the radio. And a lot of the seminars function as Q and A’s, so instead of the speakers giving lectures for a whole hour, they would open up the floor for questions, and it would give people opportunities to ask questions.”
Broadcast Engineer, Veronica Torres attended the conference in the past. She shared how her experience related to the experiences of the students this year.
“My favorite part of the trip was, honestly, hearing all the stuff that the students learned,” Torres said. “It reminded me of whenever I was a student, being there shell-shocked with how different a lot of schools were and how big they were compared to us. But I enjoyed hearing stories from other students and seeing how much they enjoyed it.”
