For Vicki Adams and Juliana Zuniga, WCSF 88.7 FM became more than a college radio station.

The University of St. Francis station runs on indie rock, a rotating cast of freshman year radio classes, and a student and volunteer team that aims to immediately connect anyone who walks in the door with the community spirit of noncommercial radio

At a record collector show outside Chicago, a dealer asked Vicki Adams what she really wanted to do with her life. She was on a break from college, working a corporate job.

“Well, I always wanted to try radio,” she told him. “I always thought that’d be really cool, but I don’t even know how you get into that.”

The vendor happened to be Anthony Musiala, the radio professor at the University of St. Francis in Joliet, Illinois. He asked whether she wanted to be a community DJ at the campus station, WCSF 88.7 FM. She said yes, started filling shifts in her free time, and eventually enrolled at the university itself.

“I saved up the money to go here because I loved WCSF so much,” Adams says. “And it’s kind of been my life ever since.”

Adams is now WCSF’s station manager and co-program director, sharing the role with Juliana Zuniga. Between them, they run a station most noncommercial radio professionals would recognize instantly – a familiar mix of volunteer DJs and a freeform format that leans on indie and alternative rock. Their passionate listeners connect with a yearly tradition: an annual rummage sale that doubles as community outreach. And they keep a tradition alive via their December Christmas program which has gone on for generations in Joliet. 

Many careers in noncommercial radio and public media start in a room like this one, and a great many in the music industry too. A love of music–that is often a teenage hobby and pastime –  is given a chance to become something real, once a local station hands over a microphone and a weekly shift. 

Noncommercial radio often gives people their first glimpse at taking a love of music and finding a community to share it with. Then it becomes a question of what you can give to your listeners and community.

Zuniga did not arrive planning any of this. She came to college to be a teacher, transferred to St. Francis still on an education track, and then decided she needed something more creative. That led her to communications, and to the fall semester radio class, where students go on-air the first day.

“That class scared me so bad because I was just a nervous person just to begin with,” Zuniga says. “And the thought of anyone hearing me anywhere else that wasn’t in this small room with these maybe five people was terrifying.”

She built a show, Lunar Radio, around music and brought facts about artists on air with her. By December of that year, she barely recognized herself. “If you had showed me myself from the end of that semester to the beginning of the semester, I’d be like, ‘Who is this person?'”

The station hired her that summer to run its social media presence, where her design work pulled curious students in to the station. Her internship transformed into an assistant program director role, then co-program director.

The speed of that ascension is partly due to the station’s size, which currently has four community DJs and four student DJs (though there are more of the latter during the school year). It’s also a core part of the philosophy behind the station. 

“It’s not about how you need to tier up – how you need to start freshman year doing little tasks, and then you never get to be on air until your junior, senior year,” Adams says. “It’s literally: You want to do it? Do it.”

It also means institutional knowledge lives in whoever is sitting in the chair. When the previous program director transferred schools unexpectedly, Adams had two weeks with him and no documentation. He walked her through the automation software, which she describes as its own complicated beast. The rest she and Zuniga worked out themselves. 

“We have this community that I guess we never had before, and then suddenly we did,” Zuniga says.

Adams has come to see the churn as a feature. “The face of it changes depending on who is leading it,” she says. Nothing has been deleted from the music library in 15 years, so she can hear what previous students played and watch each new music director bend the sound in a different direction. “It’s just a mishmash of all of these people who are super passionate about music pouring that into the station.”

Both have now been to WXPN’s NON-COMMvention, a meeting of noncommercial radio and public media that typically has not included many college radio stations. For Zuniga, who first went this past May, it introduced an industry she had not known existed in any detail. 

“There are so many people here that do a million different things, and I’ve never heard of whatever career this is in my life,” she says. “If I had known that you could be a music director, if you could be a promoter, I would’ve loved to do that.”

What stayed with her from the meeting was the mission that bound stations from all parts of the country and of all shapes and sizes. It was seeing someone stand up with a problem and then hear the room answer it. “Having that togetherness of, ‘You have this issue, let’s all figure it out together,'” she says.

The convention answered questions Adams had carried since childhood. She was 13 when a Chicago classic rock station let listeners DJ an hour of Sunday night programming. She took her turn, went to the top of the John Hancock building, and met DJs she had listened to for years. It took another decade and a record show conversation to find her way back.

Adams went to her first NON-COMMvention in 2025, barely three months into her leadership role at WCSF. After her second time at the event this year, Adams came home understanding noncommercial radio in a deeper way. “To me, radio has always been you’re going to a record store and you’re talking to some random person who’s flipping in the bin next to you and they’re like, ‘Oh, you like that? What about this?’” she says. 

Adams’ sentiment echoes what Jim McGuinn, now at WXPN and for years the program director at Minneapolis’s The Current, said back in 2018 when he described that station “as your 28-year-old friend turning up with an armful of vinyl to ask whether you had heard a band yet.” No matter if it’s just for a few years or a few decades, public and noncommercial radio instantly connects its DJs and staff with that sense of deep connection to not just music but with a community around you.

It’s a feeling that starts at the first station you DJ, but doesn’t end there. Zuniga, who graduated this May, is looking to start her career now and says noncommercial radio is an avenue she did not know she had. Adams graduates in December, and she’s already training another student to take over. She’s stretching his sessions across the semester, giving him more room than she got. She is also interning at WDCB, a jazz and blues station outside Chicago, and would stay as long as they will have her. 

“I grew up watching WKRP in Cincinnati,” Adams says. “I always loved the idea of being a part of a radio station family, being part of this quirky cast of characters that all work together. I never thought I’d be able to find it, but I found it here.”