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Molly Smith: My time at Hills

Molly Smith: My time at Hills

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After 50 years of sixth form education, Hills Road has an incredibly diverse and rich alumni base. This academic year we are meeting some of them in a new article series, My Time at Hills. This month, we hear from Molly Smith, a trainee journalist and producer working at BBC Radio Cambridgeshire.

Molly Smith attended Hills from 2019 to 2021 and studied Economics, Psychology, English Language & Literature. She is creator and presenter of the BBC Sounds podcast series The Weigh Up: Eating Disorder Diaries, and received the BBC Rachael Bland New Podcast Award in 2022 for her advocacy in an interview with Stacey Dooley.

"One thing that particularly stands out to me from my time at Hills was the invaluable pastoral support I received. I entered Hills as a very shy and unconfident 16-year-old and left with the skills to, quite literally, speak for a living!

I had an amazing head of year and tutor, Katie Paton, who deserves a big shoutout for the time she devoted towards supporting me throughout my time at Hills.

A random memory I will always have, and which seems to thread into many conversations, is the chair yoga our economics teacher encouraged us to do in the middle of the lesson! I also have countless memories from the friendships and relationships I developed during my time at Hills, and I valued the emphasis Hills Road placed on community and enrichment activities.

For my Extended Project Qualification (EPQ) I designed a support book for individuals struggling with an eating disorder and received an A* grade. The confidence I gained from the qualification helped me to use my voice to publicly speak about my past struggles with anorexia and help others on a wider level.

After leaving Hills in 2021, I began studying at the University of York where the skills of independence and work ethic I learnt from Hills helped me immensely. I started my journey to becoming a journalist soon after I started university, as a guest on a podcast hosted by Stacey Dooley on BBC Sounds. I also worked at BBC 5 Live to create and present my own podcast series The Weigh Up: Eating Disorder Diaries, which, to my huge surprise, won the 2022 BBC Rachael Bland New Podcast Award. This is a national award which searches for new podcasting voices to shed light on important topics so was an enormous honour to receive.

In addition to my journalistic work, I have also developed an interest in the voluntary sector where I have attended The Houses of Parliament and worked with local councils to deliver eating disorder workshops.

Since leaving university last summer, I have been working at the University of Cambridge and BBC Radio Cambridgeshire where I am training to become a journalist and producer. Looking forward to the future, I hope to produce and present documentaries where I can use my work to shed light on important social issues.

I feel very proud to be an alumnus of Hills Road and hope that the college continues to get the recognition and support that it deserves for the next 50 years and beyond."

Molly's advice for today's students:

"It is important to remember that you have time to figure things out, you don’t have to know everything by the time you are 18. Learn to live in the uncertainty as much as you are learning to navigate exams, university applications and growing up. Work hard, party hard but don’t aim for perfection as it doesn’t exist – trust me, I spent a long time looking for it! You are determined by so much more than a letter or number. With a kind and ambitious heart, life has so much to offer."

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