The power of audio is unique in its ability to personalize a message.  National Public Radio’s science correspondent, Robert Krulwich describes it this way: “imagine a mountain and on top of it put a little tiny house...that’s your house!”  With visuals it becomes my house, on my mountain.  This American Life’s Ira Glass describes radio as a visual medium because of this co-authoring function.  In many ways this works for the producer as much as it does for the listener.  If done well, the producer should be personally involved in telling the story and painting an aural picture for the listener.  This hyper-personal medium is perfect for documenting something so esoteric, abstract, and personal as the experience of studying abroad.  This program adds to the current media documenting Gustavus’ study abroad experience.  These methods are both institutional and independent, with some students keeping blogs and journals that may or may not be published to the public or sponsored and available to the College; they take photos to be entered into the annual international photo competition (and other photo exhibits across campus) and they have amazing stories that are passed by word of mouth once they return.  The only one of these methods of documenting the experience of students engaging themselves with cultures and ideas completely unfamiliar to that student is passing stories by word of mouth.  None of these get at the essence of the individual struggling and learning from the multitude of new and unfamiliar ideas the way that an audio documentary could.  This is not to say that the photo contest and the other methods of documenting the experience listed above are bad in any way, only that audio documentaries can do it differently. Audio can capture a part of the experience that those methods, by their nature, miss; that audio, by its nature, hits.