If you find yourself in the southern half of Thwing Center on a Monday or Thursday evening, you might hear the sound of quiz buzzers beeping away as people talk about politics, mythologies, physics and music—all within the same five-minute span.
Those buzzers come from the CWRU College Trivia Club, colloquially referred to as “quiz bowl,” a student group open to any undergraduate or graduate student who enjoys learning about, well, anything.
Earlier this semester, students competed in a quiz bowl tournament at Carnegie Mellon University. Though down a player, a team from CWRU of first-years Shawn Yoshida, Timothy Jin and Todd Cheng won initial rounds against every team except one from the Ohio State University. The team came back and won two games in a row in a disadvantaged final against OSU to win the tournament outright.
Yash Kumar, Hunter Stecko, Andrew Halza, Aparma Paul, Andreas Kowald and Abigail Cross also competed, with some also winning individual awards for being top scorers at the tournament.
The CWRU College Trivia Club also hosted one of its biggest events of the year, an annual pop culture tournament for high school quiz bowl teams from around northern Ohio—with a higher turnout than in previous years. The CWRU College Trivia Club wrote all of the questions, which will be used for subsequent tournaments hosted by other schools in Ohio.
“It’s revitalizing to see so many new and old faces helping out and bringing their knowledge to the table,” said Tyler McMaken, the club’s president and tournament director for the pop culture competition. “I can definitely see how the club has grown since my first year here, when we only had a handful of members.”
Do you want to get involved? Interested students can stop by Thwing Center’s Bellflower Lounge Monday or Thursday evening between 6 and 8 p.m. The club will travel to Michigan and OSU for tournaments and provide service opportunities at local high school quiz bowl tournaments later this semester.
In addition, the club hopes to adapt the questions written for their pop culture tournament for a campuswide intramural event this academic year.