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Julia collins jeopardy college9/9/2023 ![]() ![]() I asked her what difference she thought her preparation made in her wins, and she estimated only about 5 or 10 percent of the questions she answered correctly were from her studying. “A high school level knowledge of most things is what you need,” she told me, extolling breadth over depth of knowledge for success in Jeopardy!. She also checked The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Shakespeare out of the library to review each play’s plot, characters, and most famous quotes. As a long-time fan of the show, she knew to bulk up her knowledge of space, opera, and seasonal topics - in this case Easter, Baseball Hall of Fame inductions, the anniversary of Lexington & Concord, etc. In December, the show called and told her they were flying her to California in mid-January to tape episodes that would air in April, giving her a little more than a month to prepare. Julia took Jeopardy!’s annual online qualifying test last January, and went to live auditions in Detroit last July. You don’t need to know everything to win, you just need to know enough.” Julia told me that her success is due to a wide knowledge base, a good memory, the ability to not get rattled, and a knack with the buzzer, but that “I don’t have anything new strategically to bring to the conversation. Until she gets into a game, then she becomes relentless.” Poised and congenial, Julia nonetheless dominated her 20 games, going into Final Jeopardy with more than double the closest contestant’s score most of the time.Īs Alex Trebek said during the introduction to her 21st game, “We have a wonderfully delightful, friendly champion in Julia Collins. Earlier in the year Arthur Chu, who studied game theory before appearing on the show, drew ire for an 11-game winning streak that some considered aggressive or “unsportsmanlike,” and Julia was something of a palette cleanser for his detractors. “I’m such a Julia fan!” my mom texted me after her 17th win. The media had taken to her - or to the chance to use the term “winningest woman” as often as they could - and fans of the show loved her. ![]() She won 20 games in all, second only to Ken Jennings’s 74-game-streak, and by the time her elimination in her 21st game aired on June 2, she was a Jeopardy! celebrity. ![]() She and I were in the same class at Wellesley College (2005! Go green class!) and went through the you-seem-vaguely-familiar ropes for a while (“Do you know Lizy?” “Yeah I know Joy and Lizy, I was Melissa’s roommate.” “Ohhhhh.”)Īfter her first win, on April 21, a mutual friend of ours from Wellesley posted the video on Facebook, which means that, yeah, I was rooting for Julia before it was cool. When I met last week with Julia Collins, who recently completed the second-longest winning streak in Jeopardy! history, we spent the first 10 minutes of the interview trying to figure out if we’d met before. ![]()
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