It was lovely to welcome back Juliette and Sophie West recently.  They enjoyed their walk down memory lane and it was wonderful to hear what they are doing now:

Sophie has just finished her undergraduate degree in History & Politics at Christ’s College, Cambridge. She recalls that she spent her first two years mostly mucking around in student societies. She ran the debates for the Cambridge Union (the oldest debating society in the world), raised £3000 with two friends for domestic abuse charities during the pandemic, ran for council in 2021 for the Liberal Democrats, and organised a lot of parties (in a professional capacity - she says - running the social events for the Liberal Association and designing her College’s May Ball, in which she ended up working with Stephen Fry, writing a script for him to narrate as a voiceover for the party). She settled down in third year and hit the books, receiving the Simon Schama prize for History and Politics from her college and the John Dunn Prize for the best dissertation from the Politics Faculty. She will be continuing on at Cambridge this year for a Masters in Intellectual History and Political Thought. 

Sophie looks back on her time at Mount House with such fondness, saying:

"I was at Mount House from 2007 until 2013, boarding in my last four years. Memories come back in warm flashes: hot chocolate, served from a humongous iron pot at morning break; snoozing on sunny slopes, boys lobbing cricket balls into the nets (whether for sporting practice or just to show off to the girls, I’ll never know); running through the music block with reckless abandon at break-times; sludging through cross country in rain and hail; tentatively knocking on the headmaster's door when you’d earned enough merits; building wooden rafts which were doomed to sink in the middle of the lake, children slipping into the silt; queuing for the long-awaited tuck trolley on Wednesday evenings (where if you were a prefect, sometimes you were allowed to help serve the sweets, a position of authority that may have, or may have not been horrifically abused).

There’s no way I would’ve been able to imagine at the age of 7- frankly scared to death as I started my first year at Mount House- how things would’ve ended up. Without sounding too twee - Mount House was a fantastic preparation for the last three years of my life, not just for academia (I think the whole of our class won scholarships to our next schools), but for the sense of adventure, resilience and dare-to-do (aka: eccentricity, madness) that the school evidently sought to inspire."

Juliette has just finished the second year of her degree in International Relations at the University of Exeter. She had a busy two years there and has taken an active role in the Exeter Politics Society. She has loved being in Devon, where she has so many memories from her childhood, though she is currently in France for her third year, where she is spending the year studying International Relations with specific emphasis upon French politics and re-learning the French language (although she says she could definitely use some of Mr Walkington’s French lessons at the moment!). She will also be skiing and snowboarding as part of her degree, so is greatly anticipating the winter snow! She is also really excited to travel, with plans to visit Switzerland, Italy and Amsterdam already in motion.  After her year in France, she will be returning to Exeter in September for her final year to write her dissertation and has no definite plans beyond that but hopes to pursue a career in diplomacy and security. 

No doubt there will be much more news from Sophie and Juliette in years to come!