Kyba and radio students with her award at the top of Rockefeller Center.
Courtesy | Scot Bertram

A Hillsdale senior and an alumna received national radio awards from the Intercollegiate Broadcasting System in New York City last weekend. 

Senior Erika Kyba won “Best Specialty Show (Non-Music)” for “The Poetry Fix,” and Lauren Smyth ’25 won “Best News Director, Radio” for her work during the 2024-25 school year. Nine Hillsdale students were finalists, and seven attended the awards ceremony.

“I can tell students over and over that they are doing a great job, but it’s different when they hear it from someone else,” said Scot Bertram, general manager of WRFH/Radio Free Hillsdale. “I don’t know if it means more, but maybe it sticks with them a bit more — to have someone completely outside of this say that this is really good and is worthy of recognition.”

Kyba started “The Poetry Fix” her sophomore year and has hosted the five-minute show ever since. This was her first time as a finalist for an IBS award. 

“I’ve been working on the show for so long, and something I always keep in mind when I’m recording is how to make the show better,” Kyba said. “I just want the show to be the best it can be, so that it can be a fun and entertaining experience for people, and an educational one. So, it was really cool to hit that milestone after working so hard on trying to up the production of quality.”

Scot Bertram said Kyba has continuously tried to improve her show, and this award brings deserved recognition. 

“Erika has been working really hard on that feature from the start,” Bertram said. “It’s the sort of thing where every week, every month, you hear of her getting better, of her show getting better. She’s always trying something different, doing a little bit more, adding music and sound effects and having guest readers, all sorts of things.”

Kyba, an English major, said she started “The Poetry Fix” to teach people how to understand different types of poems, such as “The Boston Evening Transcript” by T.S. Eliot and “Demain Des I’Aube” by Victor Hugo. 

“The idea is to make the poem accessible to anyone,” Kyba said. “I love poetry, but there’s so much of it that I didn’t have any idea how to approach it before a professor explained it to me. Then, I was able to appreciate the beauty of it, and I wanted to bring other people to that.” 

Smyth now works for World News Group, on publications such as World Magazine and its children’s newscast, “World Watch,” as a Joel Belz Fellow. She was not in New York for the award ceremony and found out she won while putting away her groceries. 

“I was just trying to put my salad away in the refrigerator when all of a sudden my phone started buzzing like crazy,” Smyth said. “Then, my friend sent me a picture of the award, and I was like, ‘Wow, that’s sparkly.’ It was a great thing to happen on a random evening.”

Bertram said, for him, Smyth’s award speaks to her impact on the radio station and the impact she had on those she led. 

“Lauren was outstanding in all four years — in some way this is a legacy award,” Bertram said. “It’s not, of course, but all the great work that she did here at the station, she was nominated multiple times across the various awards we submit for. She was our news director last year at the radio station, and did a fantastic job leading that department and that team.”

Kyba said she was excited to hear Smyth win an award, as she credits her as her role model at the radio station. 

“She’s the reason I got into radio in the first place,” Kyba said. “She was always a great mentor to everyone on the team, and so driven and creative, and so we all really admire her. We were so thrilled to have her name called.”

In addition to Smyth and Kyba, sophomore Peter Andrews, Bertram, Hana Connelly ’25,  senior Sydney Green, junior Megan Li, senior Catherine Maxwell, junior Alessia Sandala, and senior Emily Schutte were finalists for awards.

“This is always a fun trip culmination of a lot of work that the students have put into shows, features, newcasts, and content throughout the course of a year,” Bertram said.