Two Blackstone LaunchPad Students Launch Podcasts
During the Spring 2025 semester two Syracuse University Libraries’ Blackstone LaunchPad (LaunchPad) students started podcasts that draw on their personal experiences. Recent graduate Sydney Moore G’25 (Martin J. Whitman School of Management) launched ‘Let’s Talk About It,’ and following in her footsteps rising junior Celes Buffard ’27 (School of Information Studies) is creating ‘Return2Reality.’
Moore, a student athlete and co-founder of a sports advocacy organization, created a podcast that focuses on the student athlete experience and the competitive sports environment. While an undergraduate student athlete at Cornell University, she worked part-time at a sports advocacy startup organization. She was accepted into a 3-month program about Name Image Likeness (NIL) where representatives from Meta encouraged student athletes to build up their social media profile. Moore reflected on her own personal journey as a student athlete: pursuing a new sport – volleyball – in a competitive high school environment. She recalled grappling with issues many high school students face but that were magnified as a student athlete, including confidence around friends, performance and her future. This perspective, along with new information she was learning about the evolving landscape of college athletics, as well as her natural curiosity and interest in storytelling, drew her to begin posting reels on Instagram about the student athlete perspective. After she reached 100,000 views on Instagram, she transitioned to a more traditional podcast format that she relaunched on Spotify, Apple and YouTube. With over 40 episodes and more than 1,000 downloads, topics range from mental health to personal identity to sports business to policy to Title IX legislation. She believes that advocacy starts with conversation. So, her goal is to serve as a resource for student athletes, providing a platform for conversations that are grounded in reliable, authentic, relatable and digestible content across the range of topics relevant to this audience.
Moore just completed her master’s in marketing and is hoping to pursue a career in professional volleyball in Europe, while continuing her podcast production. Her financial model includes monetizing YouTube through subscribers (she only needs a few more to make this a reality), as well as working with episode sponsors to share resources and build relationships with listeners through relevant content. Listeners can tune in to Moore’s podcast at https://ltbipod.com.
Buffard is creating a podcast series about the realities of entrepreneurship from her own perspective and that of other founders. She hopes to counter the media’s over-glorification of ‘making it’ and ‘deep hustle culture’ by sharing the struggles and successes of real entrepreneurs focused on surviving, including students and those struggling to support their families. Buffard was inspired by her father, a survival-entrepreneur working in real estate and construction, whom she helped while she was in high school and college. Buffard, a first-generation college student, believes that entrepreneurship can help people break a cycle of falling victim to their circumstances and instead aspire to the possibilities of becoming greater than what they thought was possible. She hopes that listeners will learn that although there are obstacles and the work can be hard and sometimes lonely, entrepreneurship also opens doors without limitations and boundaries. “Entrepreneurialism is not all glamour and glitz and becoming a millionaire may not be the reality,” said Buffard. “But through perseverance and determination anything is possible.”
Buffard envisions her podcast as a subset to a larger endeavor she’s hoping to build called Vireya, a community of excellence to help people become the best version of themselves while becoming financially independent. Her target market is at risk and formerly incarcerated youth from low-income backgrounds. She is planning to have brief introductory podcast episodes of Return2Reality on YouTube this summer, with a broader launch by the fall semester. She is also working on a faith-based podcast series called Standards of Heaven that unpacks scripture to help Christians walk with purpose, conviction and grace. The first episode of Standards of Heaven is available on https://open.spotify.com/episode/3otccryd1MX7pVW7ZltsGL.