Always with a bright, joyous smile on her face, Molly Wancewicz (12) is not afraid to speak out. Standing confidently in front of the podium, she prepares to counteract the argument presented by her opponent.

As someone who used to be timid and shy, Molly has grown out of her shy self and become more confident with herself through her experiences with debate and the support she received.

“I’ve never been a super confident person so for me, I’ve always had to put on a facade of being confident and sometimes I’ve been better at that than other times but through debate I’ve learned that it’s a lot more viable to pretend to be confident and say something that will throw the other team off as opposed to showing weakness,” she said. “I’m definitely not perfect at that, I definitely don’t always appear confident but I’m getting there.”

What first started out as a passion for debate has grew into something much more than that. Molly’s enthusiasm for debate first evolved when she was in elementary school and decided to join the speech and debate club. Her interest in speech and debate grew even more after receiving a lot of praise from her teacher for her speech on Grandparents Day.

Being chosen as one of the Near and Mitra scholars for her senior year has also provided Molly the opportunity to further develop her confidence and improve on her writing over the course of the year.

“I started out wanting to do it when I saw the video in freshman year because I’ve always really liked history and policy, so I started getting interested in my specific topic when we talked about it in APUSH,” she said. “My topic is the interaction between the women’s suffrage movement and abolitions before the Civil War ,so I was really interested in how those movements antagonized one another. Overall, it was a good experience, and I was able to better synthesize my ideas and research more efficiently. I know the topic so well now that I feel like I could talk about it for an hour.”

Aside from being involved in humanities and forensics, Molly has also been a part of many sports teams, including volleyball and lacrosse. However, in having to decide between whether to continue to pursue debate or sports, she ultimately chose debate.

“Last year I was deciding whether or not to continue playing lacrosse, and I enjoyed it but by that time in junior year, it was kind of at a point where I had to decide what activities to focus on, so it came down to spending less time on debate and traveling less for debate or playing lacrosse,” Molly said. “I ended up choosing to continue debate even though I did like lacrosse and my family wanted me to play lacrosse, and my friends played lacrosse.”

Not only does Molly have supportive friends to help her out, her major support system comes from her family members.

“I’m really grateful that my family values education because even though they don’t specifically get debate, they still do everything they can to make sure I can go to debates and to make sure that I can go to Harker because they put everything they have into us having an education,” she said. “My little brother is definitely someone at home who’s shaped me to have the instincts to be more generous and more caring, and even though right now he’s 13, his previous behavior makes me remember to be patient and be generous.”

Through her experiences and journey through debate and the humanities, Molly associates her happiness with the freedom to express her thoughts and being able to pursue what she’s truly passionate about. She also wants to be remembered as the girl who stayed true to herself and stood up for what she believed in.
“If I were to become a politician, I wouldn’t want to be someone who bowed under the pressure of the president or someone who is above me, I would want to be someone who stood up for what I thought was right and what I thought was constitutional, even if it got me fired or it caused me to lose power or money,” she said.