By Zahra Rashid
UNIVERSITY CITY, SHARJAH – The American University of Sharjah’s “Tea with Gen Z” podcast team met their listeners and interacted with them March 15 during their first in-person event.
The podcast, produced for the Office of Student Affairs, features AUS-relevant interviews and discussions about topics ranging from pop culture to student activities.
“It was very fulfilling to actually meet the people who are listening to us and supporting us in-person,” said host and TWGZ Social Media Director Dalal Awienat, adding that she considered the event, held outside the student center, a huge success.
The “Tea With Gen Z Partea” included a game, giveaways and snacks to entertain podcast listeners. The centrepiece was “Spectrum,” in which students agreed or disagreed with prompts from the hosts by moving to a corresponding line. Awienat and the rest of the team got students moving by reading off controversial or amusing statements and soliciting their opinions from strongly agree to strongly disagree. After each round, they asked some students on each side about the reasoning behind their decision.
Awienat said this was inspired by YouTube videos on the channel Jubilee, which has a similar concept.
“We wanted to put our own twist to it so we came up with many different types of prompts such as food, pop culture and AUS related prompts,” she said.
AUS related prompts included “The best building at AUS is the SBA building,” or “Breakpoint is better than Subway.” Other statements were more general, such as “One Direction will get back together,” or “Android phones are ugly.”
Awienat said the event gave her and the rest of the podcast team a boost of confidence and encouraged them to plan more events for the rest of the semester.
