Hannah Mills
Hannah Mills won a gold medal at the Rio 2016 Olympics in the women's 470 sailing event, and on New Year’s Day 2017, Mills was awarded an MBE for services to sailing. She teamed up with sailing partner Saskia Clarke just 18 months before London 2012, but saw immediate success on the water, winning silver at the 2011 World Championships and gold the next year. At the London Olympics, they won silver, but remained determined to bring home a gold medal for Team GB. The Rio 2016 win has given her fame beyond the sailing community, and Hannah is using that acclaim to fundraise for charities. Hannah is an ambassador for the Andrew Simpson Sailing Foundation, a charity that encourages children of all backgrounds and abilities to enjoy sailing; and she is now working with the NSPCC, going into schools to inspire young people to be as assured, confident and determined as she is.
Robert Lindsay
On leaving Howell’s Co-Ed College, Robert Lindsay studied for a BA in War Studies at King's College London, graduating with 1st Class Honours as well as being a recipient of the Sir Michael Howard Award for Academic Excellence. He has just completed an MA at King's, studying Intelligence and International Security, with aspirations of working in security or diplomacy. Robert has also continued to be very active in his musical pursuits as a member of award-winning vocal group All the King's Men. During his time in the group, Robert has performed in multiple sell-out runs at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, toured France, Russia and the United States, and released an album. The highlight of Robert's time in the group was performing on BBC1's Saturday night show Pitch Battle, where the group reached the live final in front of millions of viewers.
Nejra Cehic
Nejra Cehic, who left Howell’s in 2003, is a London-based television reporter and radio anchor for Bloomberg, covering the financial markets and the top European business and economy stories. Since joining Bloomberg in 2010, Nejra has travelled all over Europe to report on a variety of stories, from the demise of Nokia to a stem cell burger costing hundreds of thousands of dollars. She was a regular at EU finance ministers' and leaders' meetings in Brussels, where her bold questions to former Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti broke news and generated coverage across a number of news outlets. She has interviewed a number of prominent newsmakers, from Prime Ministers to CEOs. Prior to joining Bloomberg, Nejra worked for BBC local radio, the BBC World Service and at the BBC Paris bureau. She has a BA (Hons) in Classics and Modern Languages from the University of Oxford and a PGDip in Broadcast Journalism from Cardiff Journalism School.
Chloe Smith
In 2016, Chloe Smith was part-way through her degree course when she realised that she wasn’t enjoying university life and wanted to do something different. Chloe began volunteering with the homeless people of Cardiff, but she wanted to make more of a difference to the lives of people living on the city’s streets. The Bigmoose Coffee Co was started with the help of a Kickstarter campaign to raise £20,000. The coffee shop, in the centre of Cardiff, employs and trains homeless people as servers to give them a chance to get into full-time employment, and all the profits from the business are used to provide training, mentoring and guidance to homeless people in conjunction with local street charity Llamau, which supports young people at risk of homelessness. Chloe has just been shortlisted for Young Entrepreneur of the Year at the Wales Start Up Awards.
Emily Howell
When Emily Howell left Howell's in 2011 she studied Acting at Bath Spa University, and then set up Howell Productions to promote the talent of a group of performers she graduated alongside in July 2014. Since then she has won acclaim for Looking For Mummy: Nazanin's Story, a play she has written and produced and also stars in. The play uncovers the true and still unfolding story of Nazanin Zagahri-Ratcliffe, the British-Iranian charity worker detained in Iran. The production premiered at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival receiving 4 stars from The Independent, and was called a must-see show. While still Edinburgh, Emily learnt that the show had been longlisted for the Amnesty Freedom of Expression Award. Emily and her cast have performed at the Amnesty UK headquarters, and at the Thomas Reuters Foundation in London. Keen to get the work seen by as many people as possible, Emily has crowd-funded over £5000 to allow her to tour the production through the UK.
Dr Bethan James
Dr Bethan James is an astronomer who specialises in extragalactic observational astrophysics. When she left Howell’s she studied Physics at the University of Bristol, then did a PhD in Astrophysics at UCL. Her post-doctoral studies took her first to the USA and the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore which operates the Hubble Space Telescope science programme, and then to the Institute of Astronomy at the University of Cambridge. She is currently a Senior Research Associate at the Kavli Institute for Cosmology at the University of Cambridge.