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I was in my final stretch of college, during the height of the pandemic. I was holed up in my house in Colorado Springs, Colo., doing homework at the dining room table, when my phone rang. NPR education reporter Sequoia Carrillo was on the line, calling to tell me I had won the 2021 College Podcast Challenge.

It sounds dramatic, but that phone call changed my life. Winning the challenge helped land me my first job in radio at KNKX, an NPR member station in Seattle. Now, I’m a freelance journalist, working on the next season of Inheriting, from LAist and NPR. I’ve reported stories all over — from Owens Valley, Calif., to New York City — and have met some unforgettable people along the way.

Five years later, as the annual contest returns for another round, I reached out to a few other past participants to see if their lives changed as much as mine.

Reconnecting with family

Miriam Colvin was a freshman at Penn State University in 2021 when she became one of two winners in the inaugural College Podcast Challenge. In her podcast, she dove into family lore about a fateful boxing match between her grandpa’s friend and a teenage Muhammad Ali — or Cassius Clay as he was known back then.

Winning gave her the courage to pursue a career in stand-up comedy and playwriting. Over the years, Colvin has found herself returning to the elders in her life for creative inspiration. She loves hearing her grandpa talk about his childhood in Indiana, which he spent climbing bridges, catching birds and driving the family car around at 11 years old.

“These stories remind me we need to be out living, doing adventurous stuff with our loved ones, with our friends,” she says.

As Colvin has grown up, her grandparents’ stories have also taken on more meaning for her. Even though the world they grew up in feels unfamiliar, she’s come to recognize parts of herself in these stories.

“As you get older, you kind of realize that we’re all doing the same thing, and we all went through challenges and had growing pains.”

For Bunmi Omisore, the struggle was not just to preserve family stories, but to understand them in the first place. Her podcast, which received an honorable mention in 2025, documented the early stages of her journey to learn her parents’ native language, Yoruba.

“ While it’s very easy for me to be like, ‘Well, my parents didn’t teach me, so they can’t be mad that I don’t understand,’ it’s like, they still speak the language,” she explains. “I’m the only person who loses out by deciding not to learn.”

After making the podcast, Omisore, a senior at Duke University at the time, got serious about learning. Her father started speaking to her only in Yoruba over the phone. Her copy of Beginner’s Yoruba became water-stained and covered in pencil marks. A year later, all that hard work has paid off.