Welcome to Studentification, the podcast dedicated to exploring the relationship between colleges and the communities they’re part of. This podcast was produced by seven graduate students at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, or Cal Poly, a large public university on California’s Central Coast.We started this project with some central questions: First, do colleges contribute to gentrification in their surrounding communities? And if the answer is yes, what might that look like in our own backyard of San Luis Obispo, or as some people like to call it, SLO? Using SLO as a case study, we interviewed six local experts about how they perceive our university’s role in the community.We soon realized the answers to our initial questions are a lot more nuanced than we ever anticipated. And that when over 20,000 students build a temporary home in a town centered around a university, some pretty unique phenomena are bound to happen—and inevitably alter the fabric of a community.