The Justice

BIG WINNER: Shira Rosenblum '10 answered trivia questions and won a free semester's tuition for receiving first place in Merriam-Webster's online "Collegiate Contest." Sara Brandenburg/the Justice

"A person whose job is to find, collect and manage information that is available on the World Wide Web is called: A. a cyberneticist; B. a cyborg; or C. a cybrarian?"

If you guessed C, you either have a highly sophisticated vocabulary or have spent far too much time playing Trivial Pursuit.

The definition of a cybrarian might seem insignificant amid the comings and goings of a busy college student like Shira Rosenblum '10. But last fall, Rosenblum proved just how useful her knowledge of words and interest in trivia could be when she won a free semester's tuition as first-place winner of Merriam-Webster's online "Collegiate Contest."

Thousands of students enrolled in American and Canadian universities answered questions such as the one featured above; every 10 correct answers gave individual contestants the chance for the Merriam-Webster company to randomly select them for various prizes.

For about three days, Rosenblum set aside a few hours to looking up answers to contest questions. Participants were allowed to use the Internet and other sources in order to define words, cite quotations, figure out anagrams, and recall trivia about Merriam-Webster's founders. Students could submit correct answers to the four sets of 10 questions as many times as they liked and the questions remained the same each time, Rosenblum said.

"Some of the stuff I could figure out myself," Rosenblum said. She had to use the Internet to look up the answers to other questions, however, such as who founded the Merriam-Webster dictionary and when.

For Rosenblum, researching bits of trivia and browsing through dictionaries was not as tedious as it sounds. "I like word puzzles so it wasn't such a big deal for me," she admits.

Rosenblum is modest, attributing her achievement more to luck than to her own capability. "It's kind of weird, you didn't have to learn anything to answer the questions," she said. "You had to look up answers but it wasn't knowledge that you had. It didn't measure your intelligence; it was random."

Continued...

Page 1 of 2 next >

Article Tools