Last weekend, Brown’s quiz bowl team traveled to Rosemont, Illinois to compete in the National Academic Quiz Tournaments’ Intercollegiate Championship Tournament. Bruno’s team tied two other schools for fourth place in the Division II category, with Rohan Kher ’28 placing fourth overall individually.
In February, quiz bowl team members ranked second out of 15 teams in the New England sectionals just behind Columbia’s C team. Their regionals performance qualified them for the national tournament.
Quiz Bowl teams compete against one another using a buzzer system with questions encompassing a range of different subjects of academic trivia from a range of different subjects including “history, science, fine arts, literature, philosophy (and) mythology,” said Alexander Jiang ’27, communications director for the quiz bowl team.
“This year’s team was very well formed because we all had very good niches,” Atharv Chowdhary ’28 said.
At Nationals, Brown’s team competed in 13 matches with around 24 questions answered per match. This year, Brown was represented at Nationals by Chowdhary, Rohan Kher ’28, Alexander Vertikov ’27 and Philip Yao ’28.
Division II is designed to provide newer players with experience, according to the NAQT website. A late-night flight left the team with “minimal sleep,” Vertikov said. But the experience allowed them to “break up the monotony (of daily life) and go do something exciting,” he added.
Several rounds of questions left the team “very tired at the end,” said Vertikov. But the experience was still “fun and rewarding,” he said.
Preparation for quiz bowl tournaments usually encompasses studying “past questions, reading source materials like textbooks (or) scrolling through Wikipedia,” said Kher, who has been participating in quiz bowls since middle school. “One of the coolest parts about quiz bowl is just studying in general,” Yao said. “You can study for quiz bowl by just reading a book, listening to music or doing your classes.”
Quiz bowl “is something that gamifies knowledge and incentivizes you to learn more about things you enjoy,” Chowdhary explained. He joined quiz bowl in high school and has found the flexible preparation process to be “rewarding and satisfying.”
Coming to college, Chowdhary found the quiz bowl community at Brown to be “very chill, very relaxed.” Despite the competitive nature of quiz bowl, “everyone’s kind of just like, ‘Let’s go have fun, play some games and learn stuff,’ and nobody’s that invested in winning,” he added.
Vertikov emphasized that previous experience in quiz bowl is not necessary to participate in the Quiz Team’s practices or tournaments, citing the team’s culture of support. “This is my first time flying somewhere to go to a tournament,” Vertikov said. “There are people who really care and want to see us do well.”
