Ashleigh Piccoli, a junior environmental science and policy major, Gregory Mathews, a junior environmental science and policy major, and Sze Wing Yu, a senior environmental science and policy major, are members of the Wildlife Society team that won the first place in the Quiz Bowl at Northeast Conclave.
Senior environmental science and policy major Sze Wing Yu did not expect to win it all at this year’s Wildlife Society Northeast Student Conclave quiz bowl.
“I didn’t expect to win it — all I wanted to do was buzz in once and get one question right, but then, like, we just kept buzzing in and getting almost everything right,” she said, laughing. “It meant a lot to me because it was my third Conclave trip and my last one since I graduate soon.”
Fourteen students from this university’s Wildlife Society student group, which provides members with learning opportunities and chances to connect with professionals working with wildlife, won first place in the quiz bowl, an event at Paul Smith’s College in New York in late March that drew about 200 students from 19 universities.
This university’s group beat three universities in the final round to claim their prize: a trophy made of a taxidermied albino peacock. The cost for the trip was $100 per student, and the Student Government Association assisted with the cost by paying for half of it.
The quiz bowl is an annual event that Wildlife Society students have participated in ever since its creation at this university four years ago. They use brackets to conduct the quiz bowl, she said.
The quiz bowl tournament involves teams competing in brackets broken up into 10-minute rounds, she said. Each of these rounds involve individual team members buzzing in answers to questions about wildlife, as well as a bonus question that whole teams work on together.
“Everyone there was very supportive — even losing teams would shake your hand,” she said.
Ashleigh Piccoli, the secretary of the group that competed in the event, said the win was unexpected, considering they had lost in the first round last year.
“This is a definition of a dark horse event,” the junior environmental science and policy major said. “It was actually kind of something out of a dream — where it was so surreal because it’s hard to comprehend all at once — a lot to take in.”
Piccoli, who said she was originally supposed to be an alternate prior to a member backing out, said the biggest challenge were the questions that were not covered by classes at this university — topics such as specific fish species, for example.
“Examples of hard questions are, like, when you have to identity a species by its scientific name and, you know, the higher up all the way down to species; for things like fish or birds, I don’t think we have a fisheries class here,” Piccoli said.
However, Piccoli said, students from this university had an advantage when it came to questions on policy, thanks to environmental policy classes.
“We just killed it on the policy questions,” said junior environmental science and policy major Gregory Mathews, the treasurer of the group. “For me, I guess it was just really awesome. It was my first time participating in quiz bowl and I just did it for the fun — I didn’t expect to actually win at all.”