Schools
Columbia Wins National Trivia Contest, Earns $1M In Scholarships
The NBC Capital One "College Bowl" returned for its first season in 51 years, and a team from Columbia University took home the top prize.
UPPER WEST SIDE, NY — The "College Bowl" trivia show came back to television after a 51-year-hiatus, and the team from Columbia University beat out eleven other colleges to take home $1 million in scholarship money.
Aired on NBC and hosted by legendary football player Peyton Manning and his brother Cooper, the trivia show featured 12 schools battling it out in one-on-one matchups until only two teams remained.
An average of 2.4 million people watched each episode, according to TV Series Finale.
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In the finale, Columbia beat out the University of Southern California after the Morningside Heights school barely scraped past the University of Auburn by a score of 735 to 695 in the semi-finals.
The Columbia team was made up of the following students:
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- Shomik Ghose, SEAS ‘23
- Tamarah Wallace, CC ‘22
- Addis Boyd, SEAS ‘22
- Jake Fisher, SEAS ‘22
The SEAS acronym means those students are part of Columbia's engineering school, while the CC is for students taking core curriculum at the university's undergraduate program.
“At every stage of the way, all the teams were fantastic," Fisher told the Columbia Spectator, the university's student newspaper. "So you never have anything guaranteed at all. And especially in the finals, we knew that USC had performed really well in the past, so there was nothing guaranteed whatsoever, and we didn’t want to expect anything."
The school cheered on its team before the finals kicked off.
You can read more about the school's winning trivia effort on the Columbia Spectator's website.
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