From childhood dream to successful career

The beginning of Yasmin’s journey

She pursued her dream in multiple media companies like working in Al-Mehwar and Dream TV, in which she served as an assistant director and programmer. After that, she worked at site media production house as an assistant director and content creator for two years, which helped her in excelling/boosting her practical skills.

 However, due to personal reasons she had a pause in her career life but returned in 2012 but the issue was completely different from when she left it. During that period, social media was much more dominant and had a greater impact on people than television and radio did. She said,” My journey with on air started 2018, it was a precious dream that I had, I worked at many online radios after I graduated from mass communication cairo university.”

 So, she thought of changing the traditional form of mass communication and mixing her old experiences with new factors like the internet to help boost her career. She said "Going into the field of social media was a new idea and step that I want to take, and when I worked at online radios I saw the pros and cons in everything around me in this field. So, I was passionate about making a career out of it and make my own place and it is radio On air".

So, she thought of launching an online broadcast under her full responsibility, Yet, in order to execute such ideas, she needed to research and understand the current market and other competitors to observe their advantages and disadvantages as to launch her online broadcast differently and immaculately.

Difficulties and obstacles

However, as they say there isn’t no such thing as free lunch, she expressed the hardships she faced to achieve her desired plans. The first hardship she faced indubitably concerned financial problems, for developing any online radio station depend on self-funding rather than relying on revenues from investors or funders, like other regular on-ground radio stations and TV channels do. She also said” 2018 there were so many assistants and I had another partner at the beginning of the project. There were a lot of obstacles, the idea of an online radio most of people think that radio is FM or moga. It wasn’t easy to make people understand the idea of a radio on social media.”

She stated that in radio business you have to be totally self-dependent and funding, which was the most difficult issue in the beginning but as time passed by, she overcame that problem. Second hardship she faced was people's judgement of a private business owned by a woman, especially in governmental institutes. Which had its impact on her in causing her many obstacles in getting her official papers and licenses done as she expressed, she felt like she was not welcomed into the world of private businesses.

She demonstrated that in the era we're living, they usually don’t walk the person, especially women easily through the needed steps for getting the papers and making the process more feasible. The most common reply she heard was, “Well, we will see and try to do it.” Which of course, left her in moments of complete frustration, as she was not getting anything done easily and she was starting to feel despair in ever achieving the dream she always had when she was 10. Yet it also helped her gain patience and endurance for all that happens in governmental organizations. She continued that ON-AIR is not only about online broadcasting anymore, it includes complete media production for everything related to sound.

Management of her time

After she gave birth, it was hard for her to continue to work, but the idea was all about time management because everybody in this field knows that time passes so quickly that you don’t feel it. So, she tried finding time when her children did not need her but they have grown up a bit, which allowed her to begin to withdraw maternity duties from them gradually.

Inspiring advices for people especially women

Last thing if she could give advice to anyone who wants to start their own project and especially women; she wants them to mentally digest the whole project idea from A to Z and study the pros & cons of establishing your own radio station because as much as the field seems to be fascinating, there are always hidden difficulties that should be considered. Furthermore, she wants aspiring radio station launchers to keep in mind that the day you start achieving the project, you must first choose the right team to support you as no one will be able to run the whole entity alone bearing in their mind that they can do everything.

You also must set your priorities and have clear plans along with choosing your team carefully. Consequently, she guarantees them success in as long as perseverance and determination are maintained.