206: Numi Gildert

My guest this week is Numi Gildert who is the cohost with Rob Wills of the Drivetime show on KMFM. Numi has a robotics engineering background (including a PhD) and always loved consuming radio when she was young. She grew up in Macclesfield and listened to Silk FM, and later enjoyed Chris Moyles on the Radio 1 Breakfast Show when she was nine.

Numi reveals that she always had a flair for performance and had pragmatic parents who worked in the corporate world. Numi loved science and anything Japanese including anime and manga. We find out how she then got into robotics, leading to her studying electronic engineering at York where she also presented on student radio.

We talk about the value of live radio vs. the value of editing and how radio is better suited to her as a person. We learn too about Numi’s podcast and its focus on women in engineering and technology, and how there are more career opportunities for women in engineering now than there were in previous generations.

We also talk about how education has changed over the years. Numi did some teaching while doing her PhD, and Numi discusses why her doctorate had its traumatic moments.

We discuss the way we had to embrace new technology due to lockdown, and Numi tells us which of her teachers or lecturers she is still in touch with. We also reflect on how education is a long term process, and Numi explains why it is important to confront one’s mistakes.

We discuss the skill of presenting a show on the radio, especially when things go wrong, and we find out what sort of music Numi enjoyed listening to when she was young. She presented Radio 1 Dance in the early hours of the morning some years ago, where she would play the music her parents used to enjoy.

We reflect on the importance of having a wider sense of the music that is out there, rather than stick to just one genre, and at the end of the interview we discover whether Numi is a looking back or a looking forward type of person and why, in her own words, it is good to have a slightly delusional dream.