Northeastern student competes on Jeopardy!

The answer is: A polit­ical sci­ence and com­mu­ni­ca­tions studies com­bined major, with an affinity for U.S. his­tory, she is North­eastern University’s first-​​ever par­tic­i­pant on the Jeop­ardy! Col­lege Cham­pi­onship.

Who is Kate Laubscher?

On Tuesday night, Laub­scher, SSH’18, will rep­re­sent the Red and Black in the second quar­ter­final of the 2016 tour­na­ment, in which col­lege stu­dents show­case their gen­eral knowl­edge skills on the famous quiz show for a chance to win the $100,000 grand prize.

“It was a crazy expe­ri­ence,” Laub­scher said. “They filmed the whole tour­na­ment over two days so it was a whirl­wind. It’s a very short amount of time to prove your­self. But I’m really excited to have had the oppor­tu­nity to rep­re­sent Northeastern.”

The episode, which was filmed in Jan­uary, will air Tuesday at 7:30 p.m. EST on CBS. Check your local list­ings if you aren’t in the EST zone.

Laub­scher grew up watching Jeop­ardy! with her father Rick, whom she said has the skills to be a con­tes­tant on the show him­self. She knew of the Col­lege Cham­pi­onship and took the online exam, a require­ment for all prospec­tive Jeop­ardy! contestants.

“I kept my expec­ta­tions pretty low,” Laub­scher acknowl­edged. “I just wanted to see how I would do. And I just kept moving on through the process.”

She scored well enough to be one of about 250 stu­dents selected for the next phase, which included trav­eling to New York City to take a written exam and playing a mock ver­sion of the game in front of three of the show’s producers.

When Laub­scher said she found out she was going to be on the show, every­thing moved so quickly that she didn’t have a lot of time to pre­pare. And rec­og­nizing that it’s pretty dif­fi­cult to study for Jeop­ardy!, she focused on topics that were easy to mem­o­rize, such as world cap­i­tals and the names of U.S. presidents.

“I don’t think my prepa­ra­tion was as rig­orous as it could have been, but I’m not very good at cram­ming so it might not have helped,” she joked, adding, “My friends wanted to help me and kept ambushing me with questions.”

She also watched episodes of the show and prac­ticed buzzing in to answer, using a pen she got at the live audi­tion in New York City. “The buzzer is actu­ally really dif­fi­cult, just to get the timing right, and that can be frus­trating,” Laub­scher said.

And while she couldn’t reveal how well she per­formed in the tour­na­ment, which runs until Feb. 12, Laub­scher encour­aged the North­eastern com­mu­nity to watch the entire competition.

“It’s going to be a good tour­na­ment,” she said. “There are some very smart students.”