The Lifecycle of a Project: Wynee’s Story
Wynee Pintado ‘24 joined the Director’s Cohort in Fall 2023 to work on the podcast she started 2 years prior, Inmigración Descifrado, which targets immigration misinformation. The Director’s Cohort, led by Athena’s Constance Hess Williams ‘66 Director, Umbreen Bhatti, offers students the time and space they need to focus on in-progress projects, coupled with coaching and support. Wynee, a senior with eyes toward graduation, wanted to grow Inmigración Descifrado beyond herself and pass the project on to new leadership.
Wynee created Inmigración Descifrado during 2021 as a sophomore in the very first cohort of the Athena Fellows community of practice. But back then, it wasn’t a fully-developed podcast yet. Wynee set out to explore the legal side of immigration, recording interviews with anyone she could find who engaged with the immigration process either professionally or personally, including a criminal defense attorney and an immigration lawyer whom she met through the Barnard network. The interviews led to her final Athena Fellows project — a prototype for the podcast, in the form of an episode for Radio Impacto, a local radio show in Jackson Heights, about the 10 most common misconceptions about immigration.
“Immigration is not as straightforward a process as you may think,” Wynee reflects on starting the podcast. “Experiences vary. For example, one person’s experience applying for asylum will not look like another’s, even though they seek the same thing. That’s what I revealed in the first episode – clearing up misconceptions about immigration processes and exposing the discrepancies and complications in the system.”
If you had asked Wynee back then if her project was complete, she would have agreed. There were no more loose ends, her episode for Radio Impacto could stand alone. But as she entered her junior year, immigration questions still pervaded her mind. Wynee continued to reach out to lawyers, community members, and students to hear their stories. That’s when the idea for Inmigración Descifrado came about.
That summer of 2023, between her junior and senior years, Wynee partnered with Info al Desnudo, a Spanish language media company out of New York City that provides news led by community activists, and pitched her own segment, using her Radio Impacto episode as an example. Info al Desnudo provided Wynee with a larger audience, weekly structure, and dedicated online episode archive. By the end of the summer, the show gained 300 subscribers.
“I thought, ‘This is actually getting attention! People want to listen!’ Wynee laughs. “That’s when I decided to continue Inmigración Descifrado and see how far I could take it.”
“My senior fall, I heard that Athena’s Center Director, Umbreen, was making the Director’s Cohort. I signed up, thinking that it could provide me the time and space to figure out how to bring Inmigración Descifrado to its next evolution.”
The Director's Cohort helped Wynee learn how to leverage her own networks to recruit new team members. Wynee established new roles too, including a host, outreach coordinator, video editor, and social media manager. The new workflow is as follows: the host and outreach coordinator research and recruit guests, then conduct preliminary interviews before recording the real deal. Then, the video and audio files are passed to the editor and social media manager who then create promotional materials.
“Within two days after posting the opportunities, around 40 people applied. The lesson I learned here is that once you start something and you've gained a community of people, they will continue branching out, and that's how you grow.”
“There was one moment when I was working with Umbreen, and she asked me what the transition would look like now that I have a team, taking the approach of an advisor rather than an active team member. I was used to doing things on my own and getting things done in the manner I wanted to, but now I needed to learn how to delegate certain tasks and keep track of people.”
When she first began building Inmigración Descifrado, Wynee thought leadership meant advocating for the causes that she cared about. But since the Director’s Cohort — and before that, the Athena Fellows program, her definition has expanded—no longer is leadership limited to her own advocacy, now, her practice includes finding ways to extend the opportunity to others. In this case, it means learning how to step down.
It’s all coming full circle in Spring 2024, Wynee’s final semester at Barnard. She aims to close out her chapter on Inmigración Descifrado within the Succession Planning community of practice, which brings together other similarly-situated student creators to consider about the lifespan of a project or idea and how it lives beyond their individual participation. Led by guest expert Swati Apte, Wynee and the other members of the cohort are digging into the kinds of questions that Wynee uncovered during her Director’s Cohort experience. For Wynee, having new infrastructure for the podcast makes answering those questions easier — and being able to draw from Swati’s guidance as she does so is an enormous help.
“To anyone else who wants to advocate for an issue but feels unsure how to go about it: just be wide open and receptive to people, their criticisms, and advice. You never know when someone can spark an idea about how to change your approach.”
At Athena, Barnard students can find the community and resources they need to dive deep into their interests and create something new. But Athena also provides space to think through the lifecycle of a project — from bringing it into the world, to ending it with purpose, or in Wynee’s case, passing it into the next set of hands. Making room for others provides them with a legacy of opportunity; for Wynee, it makes room for new beginnings.
Wynee is an alum of the Athena Fellows, Director’s Cohort, and Succession Planning communities of practice. After Barnard, she plans on moving to Washington DC to pursue a career in immigration law.
Want to start your own project? Learn more about Athena’s various communities of practice here.