Match Volume

This episode explores the relationship between roommates who have survived New North and now reside in the USC village! We've had our fair share of ups and downs, but have only grown closer in the process. This is a blueprint for anyone who's searching for a roommate, looking to replace one, or wondering how we've made it work for so long.  Nothing too mushy, but also answering the question of why we've chosen to live apart our junior year, dun dunnnnn

Allyson Felix: Earning Olympic 11 medals, she is becoming the most decorated track athlete in U.S. history.

If you ever wanted a sneak-peak into what it is like to work in Annenberg Media, this is your all-access pass episode. Executive editor Nataly Josepth about what led her to join Annenberg Media and her journey in the newsroom. `

In this week's episode, Match Volume’s Ashi Kumar "sits down" with fellow USC student Natalie Park to talk about how she started her fashion blog, how to overcome challenges in the content creation space, and advice on how to juggle school/life and being a creator. 

Check out Natalie’s blog: http://www.nataliepark.com/

In this week's episode, Match Volume’s Ashi Kumar "sits down" with recent USC graduate Alexis Zimmerman to talk about how to handle the ups and downs of post-graduate life. We talk about how to handle post-grad anxiety, comparing yourself to other graduates and all the struggles being an adult entails. Hopefully, this episode will make the student to adult transition a little less scary and intimidating - don’t worry you don’t need to have all answers now. 

 In this week's episode, Match Volume’s Ashi Kumar "sits down" with fellow USC trojan and successful food blogger Mandi Mikasa to discuss how to create a successful food blog. Her food blog is dedicated to trying and rating new food and beverage places in Los Angeles. The account has had rapid success with over 5,000 followers. Mandi speaks about the ins and outs of starting a blog. From how to create an authentic follower base to the right camera angles to make your food look otherworldly, Mandi is here to help! As a food expert, Mandi gives her favorite LA restaurants and café recommendations. If you are eager to learn how to create a successful blog, keep followers engaged or know where to eat when you are in LA, this is a conversation you don’t want to miss. 

You can follow Mandi’s account @foodoflosangeles. 

On this week’s episode of Match Volume, Contributor Halee Anderson sits down with Taylor Hill-Miles, Logan Norman, and Ryan Driver to talk about her trepidation after doom scrolling TikTok, and why Black Americans need to explore opportunities in the Metaverse. Hill-Miles is a biomedical engineering major. As the chair of the campus NSBE Pre-Collegiate Initiative (PCI),  she is helping to advance Game Change 25, a national strategy to increase the pool of Black engineers. Norman, a computer science major and an NSBE member, entered the blockchain/web3/NFT space recently and describes how Black Americans are already making waves with these new technologies. Driver is a business major at Marshall. He’s a “veteran” in the NFT space, with some early success leveraging the unique non-fungibles. He explains how the community aspect of the metaverse makes it extremely accessible and primed for  growth.

This week, Ryan Coleman had a conversation with Judy Muller and Cheri Mathews, the co-author of the book: red-headed cook of the desert: meth, murder, and motherhood. Judy Muller is an American journalist who earned an Emmy Award for coverage of the O.J.Simpson case. When she first met Cheri Mathews, a woman serving “lifetime parole” for murder, the story just began.The book takes readers on a journey into Cheri's complicated life, from her ill-fated attempts at marriage and motherhood to her love affair with meth to the murder that landed her in prison.

Check out more about the roller-coaster tale here.

For this week’s episode, Match Volume’s Shitong Zhang talked with Shawn Tran, the founder of Cup of Troy, a pop-up coffee shop starting from USC. Shawn is also a Trojan who majored in the music industry. He and his friends started their coffee business as a hobby during the pandemic and now Cup of Troy has become a brand every trojan knows. 

Check out Cup of Troy on Instagram to find more about their events and menu. 

In the last week of USC's APISA Heritage Month, Match Volume's Lutian Wang sat down with Isaac Vigilla, a native Hawaiian working as a USC faculty member. They started from the story of pineapple and then dug deeper into Hawaiian history and culture, raising people's awareness of the significant contributions made by Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.

This week, Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen joined Match Volume with Isis Leung, Grace Galante, and Julia Kim. Frances Haugen is an advocate for accountability and transparency in social media and a former Facebook employee. She disclosed thousands of Facebook's internal documents to the public to expose the company's ethical shortcomings. In this episode, Haugen shared what led to her courageous decision to blow the whistle on Facebook and her thoughts on the misinformation on social media platforms.

For this week's Match Volume, Nataly Joseph sat down with Alice Wong, a disabled activist, writer, editor, and the founder of the Disability Visibility Project, which is a project collecting oral histories of people with disabilities in the US. Wong also served as a presidential appointee to the National Council on Disability. In this episode, Wong and Nataly had a conversation about Wong's upcoming new book, Year of the Tiger. The book is a groundbreaking memoir in essays showing Wong's journey to finding and cultivating community and the continued fight for disability justice. Check out her debut memoir here.

This week on Match Volume, our very own Nataly Joseph talked with Nikki Nguyen, who founded Trans Defense Fund in LA. Trans Defense Fund is a mutual aid group providing self-defense kits and classes to trans folks in response to the disproportionate violence that trans folks face, especially Black and brown trans women. According to a report, Last year, at least 50 trans and gender non-conforming people, mostly Black and brown women, were killed, reaching the highest number of deaths since 2013. Things need to be changed and here comes Nikki Nguyen.

This Monday, the 2022 Selden Ring Award for Investigative Reporting was presented to ProPublica for their project, "The Secret IRS Files", which analyzed a massive trove of secret IRS data, revealing a series of systemic inequities that allow America’s wealthiest citizens like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffet to pay little or nothing in federal taxes compared to their massive fortune. The award-winning team joined Match Volume with Andrea Valeria Diaz to talk about the stories and creation process of the amazing investigative report.