A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

AFTER THE BEE, VOL. II:  During this afternoon break before we return (ESPN, 8:30p EDT), please enjoy many more updates compiled by JJ Goldstein, showing just how much Bee veterans accomplish after (and based upon) this experience:

Megan McFall: #176, 1998 (85th) & #52, 1999 (22nd)

I went to Grove City College and I studied Business/Communication. I am currently working in Human Resources for Bechtel Power Corporation. On a serious note, I am working on a novel and would like to be published within the next year. On a slightly less serious but still somewhat plausible note, I would like to be the next spokesperson for Pepsi Max. (Yes, only Pepsi Max.)

I think more than anything the spelling bee taught me that you don't have to be the best to be good at something, you can work hard and still not win everything and the people who are the best/powerful/famous have just worked hard at something and so therefore they are good at it (usually). Obviously there are exceptions but in life it's good to remember where hard work can get you and to not be discouraged if you're not the best. Also, because of all of the word study I love to write hence the novel. 

Jesse Zymet: #129, 2002 (26th) & #4, 2003 (8th)

I just graduated from Rutgers University with majors in linguistics and quantitative economics and minors in mathematics and cognitive science. My choice of majors and minors reflects my attempt to keep as many doors open as possible. While my life goal is to eventually obtain a Ph.D. in theoretical linguistics (after which I would work in academia, if I get lucky) or computational linguistics (after which I would work in the computer industry), I decided to obtain additional degrees closely related to quantitative management in case I want to go into the private sector.

The bee has influenced me in a number of ways.



Firstly, it taught me to recognize beauty in the more abstract patterns of life. As an eighth-grader I would stare in awe at kakidrosis (meaning odorous secretion of sweat), a word derived from the Greek kakos 'bad' and hidros 'sweat'; remarkably, when the two roots combined, the h in hidros dropped out. At the time (and, to some degree, even now), I thought that the h-deletion was due to some "aesthetic principle", as though kakhidrosis (or even kakohidrosis) was uglier than kakidrosis, and so the former spelling would forever remain nonexistent. Maybe a passerby (who wasn't in the spelling bee) wouldn't have given a second thought to such a thing (and perhaps would never have even come across the word, let alone its derivation); nevertheless, if they were observant, they might have identified some interesting aesthetic principles that arise in other fields such as mathematics or linguistics. Because I was exposed to aesthetic principles as a kid, I am able to appreciate them ever more as an adult.

Secondly, the endless hours of studying for the bee prepared me for the endless hours of studying for college exams. Whether it was surveying the myriad of molecules I needed to learn before a chemistry final or the laundry list of barely solvable differential equations I needed to learn before a calculus exam, I was (somewhat) prepared to take on the ocean of work ahead of me. Some say that preparing for the National Spelling Bee was only an end in and of itself. I dismissed their reasoning—my response was always that, on average, good spellers became good workers. To this day, I have come across very little evidence to the contrary.

As many people have told me, there does exist life after all the pages we turn in the Merriam-Webster's Third, after all the eruptions of applause we hear upon nailing words that the audience believed to be impossibly difficult, after hearing the fateful toll of Ms. Brooks's bell (or, for few, not hearing it). The spelling bee is only a stage in a speller's lifetime, a means through which he or she grows as a person. It is, after all, only a competition.

Naomi Ahsan: #147, 2002 & #24, 2003

I am currently studying Neuroscience at the University of Rochester, getting ready to complete a fifth year as a Take Five Scholar to study public health. I hope to practice medicine and maintain interest in public health.

The National Spelling Bee instilled a very strong sense of academics as a sure path to achievement. I got out of my participating in the NSB what I put in, in terms of time, dedication, development of skills. I learned that hard work would pay off. I think my participation in NSB had a strong relationship also to my passions for reading and writing-- I don't know if its that those things made me a better speller, or that becoming a better speller made me a better reader and writer. It's probably some of both! Also, after studying for the NSB, even three years later, SAT vocabulary was nothing to be afraid of.

Chelsey Bohr: #198, 2003

I completed my undergraduate education at Northwestern College (Orange City, Iowa) with a B.A. in Psychology. In August, I'll start graduate school in Clinical Psychology (Master's of Science) at Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. Following graduate school, I hope to work at an inpatient clinic for anxiety disorders as a therapist or maybe oversee a community mental health clinic. Of course, there's always the possibility that prior to graduation I'll decide to continue school and pursue a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology or Clinical Psychology.

To be honest, in the first few years following my participation in the National Spelling Bee, it didn't influence my life -- at least not positively; it was simply another thing that added to the already awkward phase of life that was high school. The spelling bee had added a lot of negative pressure and when combined with my overly ambitious spirit, what tended to result was an overworked, exhausted teenager. Nonetheless, the years spent preparing for the bee did supplement my love of language.

Although I didn't choose to major in English, the Classics, or Linguistics, college was a turning point in how I viewed the years I spent studying dictionaries. The first two years of undergrad, I was especially careful to keep my history with the spelling bee hidden because I didn't want any information divulged that could potentially cause me to appear weird. It wasn't until the fall semester of my junior year that I realized college was different; academic eccentricities were welcomed and my professors appreciated it.

Snigdha Sur: #153, 2001 (35th) & #20, 2004 (16th)

I am currently a rising senior at Yale, studying Economics & South Asian Studies. This summer, I will be working in Athens, Greece with Accenture. I am thinking Law School - Entertainment/business law or working at a Hindi cinema production company down the line.

The spelling bee will always stay with me. Whether it's the appreciation or the fire I get when I come upon a new word, or the natural inclination to break down words I already know to understand them in a new way, or making a killing in any category on Jeopardy! that refers to etymology or spelling. The spelling bee introduced me to an amazing and brilliant community, and I have met no other group who are as voracious readers as we are. Funny story: my floormates found out I was in the spelling bee and "rasterbated" a picture of 11-year-old me. We were all awkward little geeks then and it's great to see how much has changed and what we are now pursuing.

Amy Goldstein: #143, 1998 (4th)

I graduated from the Macaulay Honors Program at Queens College with a degree in Linguistics, followed by a masters degree in journalism with a health and medicine reporting and online media concentration from the CUNY Graduate School for Journalism. I currently work as an associate editor at ESPN.com.

For more of my thoughts on the spelling bee, see here.

Erik Zyman-Carrasco: #144, 2002 (10th), #20, 2003 (7th), & #152, 2004 (47th).

I'm going into my senior year at Princeton University, where I'm majoring in linguistics, but have also had the tremendous privilege of being able to take excellent courses in a variety of other areas, including computer science, molecular biology, chemistry, Ancient Greek, and Modern Hebrew. At the risk of sounding like an official brochure, my school is absolutely phenomenal: it offers top-notch classes with terrific professors who are often leaders in their fields, all on an unbeatable campus. As if that weren't already great, it's also enabled me to become close friends with some crazy, awesome, quirky nerds (not unlike my friends from the Bee!), who are impressively knowledgeable; cultured; and, most importantly, ardently philomathean. Which is humbling, but also really, really valuable. During my last year at Princeton, I hope to take advantage of the opportunities it offers to the greatest extent possible.

Once I graduate from college, I plan to immediately apply to Ph.D. programs in linguistics, as I want to become a linguist. A prominent traditional goal of linguistics—to describe the grammatical systems of the world's languages—is still a very important goal, but now one of the main objectives is to answer the following question: How is a speaker's knowledge of their native language represented in their mind?* A particular research interest of mine is what endangered and understudied languages can teach us about linguistic theory in general—in other words, about what possibilities (phonological, syntactic, semantic, and so on) the human capacity for language, whatever exactly it is, makes available to us.

Thanks in large part to Princeton's emphasis on original academic research by undergraduates, I have already begun to be able to pursue this interest. In my two "junior papers," I have investigated two phenomena in P'urhépecha, an indigenous language of Mexico not known to be related to any other language. Although many P'urhépecha people are fiercely proud of their language and culture and defend them passionately, this language has been studied far less by professional linguists than, say, English or French. The phenomena I examined are "split intransitivity" and the relationship between "information structure" and syntax—investigations that would have been impossible without the invaluable help of native P'urhépecha speakers whom I contacted over the Internet and who generously spent time and effort sharing with me their knowledge of their language. Other research interests of mine (which I have not done original work on yet) include binding; ellipsis, scope, and their interaction; the nature of long-distance dependencies; combining the insights of generative and nongenerative linguistics; and functional structure, the last of which I'm currently planning to write my senior thesis on. If you don't know what these things are—which is fine!—then take some linguistics courses in college and find out! It's a fascinating field, and there's a ton left to discover, and no end of mysteries that remain to be solved!

(Aside from kicking my thesis into gear, my other plans for this summer include tutoring English vocabulary and Latin, getting some exercise, and hanging out with friends.)

My experience in the Bee was immensely valuable because it taught me an incredible amount about

- English words (their spellings, pronunciations, meanings, etymologies, parts of speech, and so on);
- languages such as Latin and Greek; and
- sound-spelling correspondences in many more languages and in the English words that come from them.

Furthermore, my Bee years provided me with terrific friends, many of whom I still keep in touch with, and years of good times, both within our beloved Grand Hyatt and without.

*Yes, "their"—linguistics is a descriptive discipline, not a prescriptive one!