Students lead the way on the road to quiz bowl’s grand event
Later this month, ACF Nationals will be held at Duke University on April 20-21, 2024. Historically, ASU has not been part of this event, but this year marks ASU's inaugural qualification.
To secure a spot at this esteemed event, university teams navigated a series of rigorous tournaments, vying for qualification alongside renowned institutions like UChicago, Cornell, and Stanford. Jaik Havlick, an Economics and Philosophy double major and alumnus of the Critical Languages Institute, provided insights into his preparation for ACF Nationals and the journey of ASU's quiz bowl team.
While also participating in ASU’s Academic Bowl, an internal ASU quiz bowl event, Jaik emphasized the significance of ACF Nationals for a quiz bowl player. “Teams play in two to ten tournaments during the course of the year, with a single qualifying tournament called ACF Regionals in January,” Jaik explained. “Winning ACF Nationals is the most you can hope to achieve for your school as a quiz bowl player.”
Through all of the activities that take place in a quiz bowl, one of the things he appreciates is its crossing of disciplinary boundaries. “Many of the nation's best quiz bowl players (including my teammate and captain Bryan Ugaz) are graduate students, but all have interests and deep knowledge in fields that they have no professional affiliation with. Bryan, for example, is a National Science Foundation scholar, PhD student in chemistry at ASU, and one of the best science quiz bowl players nationally, but also specializes in world literature for our quiz bowl team.”
Utilizing his coursework from the Critical Languages Institute's Russian program, he leveraged his language skills to excel in quiz bowl tournaments. “Linguistics is a category that comes up multiple times a day during a tournament, and a grammatically complex language like Russian gives you a great window into syntax and historical linguistic change.” He emphasized that delving into a grammatically intricate language like Russian offers valuable insights into syntax and historical linguistic shifts. “CLI puts you in contact with people studying languages of cultures from around the globe, and instructors who come from cultures you’ve only read about.”
With ACF Nationals coming up, Jaik and his teammates will also spend their time reading and expanding their knowledge. “My teammates, I know, are doing the same: Denis Liu, a senior computer science and mathematics double major, is our fine arts player and is currently reading Harold Schoenberg’s Lives of the Great Composers for the second time. Skand Parvatikar, a computer science major, is working on reading about American history and world mythology. Our captain, Bryan, is reading a different book every time I see them, so I’m not even sure what they’re doing right now, but I’m certain they’re reading something. We’re really looking forward to competing against the country’s top teams, and we’ll be going back next year, too.”