This Duke student competed in the ‘Jeopardy!’ College Championship. How did she do?
Duke University student Anna Muthalaly’s run in the “Jeopardy!” National College Championship ended in the quarterfinals Tuesday after a hard-fought battle against students from Yale University and Carnegie Mellon University.
In a March Madness-style bracket, Muthalaly walked away with $10,000.
She started off strong, taking the first few questions, but ultimately ended up with a negative score and missed the Final Jeopardy round.
“It was a gift of an experience,” Muthalaly said in an interview with The News & Observer before the show aired on ABC on Tuesday night.
She’s proud that she was smart enough to beat out all the other students who applied to appear on the show. She said she knows it was a mix of hard work and luck that brought her to the stage.
“The best things in life are connected to a lot of work,” she said.
The 20-year-old junior from Hoover, Alabama, is studying public policy and global health with a minor in statistics at Duke.
Quiz bowl participation
Muthalaly grew up competing in academic quiz bowls on a national stage. Last fall, she landed on the biggest stage and spent her Thanksgiving break in Los Angeles filming for “Jeopardy!” That came two days after taking a midterm exam and a week after she performed a show with Duke’s Department of Theater Studies.
The three days of filming involved a mix of taking silly selfies with new friends, taking glamour shots for promos, playing tourist on TV sets in Culver City and competing in a high stakes trivia game. One of the 36 undergraduates who wins is going to walk away with a quarter of a million dollars.
Muthalaly admittedly she didn’t study much for “Jeopardy!” and was more focused on her economics exam. But years of team-based trivia helped prepare her for the moment.
“Whatever you have in your brain, you’re going to run with it,” Muthalaly said.
She compared being on “Jeopardy!” to baseball players dreaming of playing in the MLB.
She decided to apply for the show and take the initial test during her sophomore year at Duke. Several months later, she got a text while sitting in that economics class in August confirming a few details on her application and that she’d be available to compete.
After an intense background check and several rounds of auditions via Zoom, she got the final confirmation call.
While trivia might seem pointless to some, Muthalaly said at its heart, trivia is about knowing important things about the world.
Live after ‘Jeopardy!’
Now that she’s back in Durham, Muthalaly is focusing on her studies at Duke and preparing for an upcoming TED Talk about consent models in the South. She’s working toward pursuing a career that combines her talents as a writer, a thinker and an advocate, particularly focused on women’s reproductive rights.
That could be writing policy and influencing lawmakers or writing opinion pieces for The New York Times.
While she didn’t win the top prize, Muthalaly is thankful for the experience and the exposure.
“I’m extra grateful that I worked really hard at something and it resulted in all this money and public intrigue,” she said.
The semifinals of the “Jeopardy!” National College Championship will air Thursday and Friday and the finals will air Tuesday, Feb. 22.
This story was originally published February 15, 2022 at 9:37 PM.
