Members of the UT Dallas quiz bowl team (from left), Grace McClure, Stephen Badger, Beck Duggleby and Mark Mondt, practice for the upcoming Intercollegiate Championship Tournament.
Visit a practice session of The University of Texas at Dallas quiz bowl team, and you’ll hear a wide variety of questions answered.
Four teammates — eyes forward, listening intently — connect the mental dots. From displacement to dissonance, from Duchamp to Disraeli, the subjects run the gamut of academia.
These Comets are getting ready for the school’s first trip in 20 years to the Intercollegiate Championship Tournament, the annual showcase event for a pursuit that seems very much in sync with the UT Dallas ethos.
“At its core, UT Dallas is about intellectual endeavors, and I think quiz bowl blends that culture of the pursuit of knowledge beautifully with competition amongst ourselves and with other schools,” said Nicole Harrington, who oversees the quiz bowl organization as a program coordinator with the Eugene McDermott Scholars Program. “When the opportunity arises to bring students together in scholastic pursuits, it is exciting and worth supporting.”
The More You Know . . .
A quiz bowl match features two teams of up to four players competing to answer questions about science, history, literature, religion, fine arts and more. Its origins date to the 1950s, when College Bowl competitions aired on American radio stations, and then on network television.
Stephen Badger, a senior McDermott Scholar studying electrical engineering, got the UTD quiz bowl team running again in fall 2014 after a dormant period. He picked up quiz bowl while in high school in New Jersey.
“Your performance is based on how much you know pitted against players from other schools,” Badger said. “It’s a lot of fun, and you learn a lot.”
As a junior at a technology-geared magnet high school, Badger made himself a more useful quiz bowl player by expanding his horizons beyond the STEM subject matter he already knew.
“At a school where I was surrounded by people with that knowledge base, we didn’t need another physics and chemistry expert,” he said. “So I became a literature and general humanities player because that was something else that was of interest to me.”
A balanced team with specialties across disciplines is best able to match up against other teams. This season, the UT Dallas squad has posted victories over top-level teams from Rice University, UT Austin and Tulane University, among others.
“It definitely helps if people have a subject that they are passionate about,” Badger said. “While broad intellectual curiosity is good, if people have something they’re really interested in, they are more inclined to persistently study that, and they’ll perform better.”
Beck Duggleby, a sophomore studying geospatial information sciences, expanded his range of expertise to include music.
“In high school, I was mainly interested in geography and current events,” he said. “I didn’t expect classical music to be something I’d enjoy, but listening to and learning about it, I began to appreciate it much more. The same goes for art and architecture. Quiz bowl has definitely broadened my interests.”
New Participants Are Welcome
Cognitive science student Grace McClure, who like Badger is in the 2014 Class of McDermott Scholars, sees UT Dallas as an ideal place to find the right ingredients for a winning quiz bowl team.
“I think the student body here is very curious, and very serious about the subjects they’re passionate about,” she said. “I think that fits really nicely, that wide array of interests, with building a successful team. UTD students in general have interests outside of their majors that they get really excited about.”
Badger emphasized that the door is open for new participants — especially with the core group that arrived in 2014 about to graduate.
“Any UTD student can absolutely drop by a practice and check it out,” he said. “We have a Facebook group and regular meetings.”
The Intercollegiate Championship will be held in the Chicago area on April 14.
