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April 6, 2004
March is Bowl Season
GW Team Takes Second in World Geography Bowl
In only its second year fielding a geography bowl team,
an all GW-squad representing the Mid-Atlantic region took second place
at the nationals of the World Geography Bowl, part of the centennial meeting
of the Association of American Geographers in Philadelphia, PA.
GW faced heated competition to reach the finals in this year’s bowl,
matching up against eight other regional divisions to qualify for the
finals and go head-to-head against the Southeast Division, which included
players from North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, South Carolina and Georgia.
“The competition is all in good fun,” said Wesley Reisser, a
senior majoring in international relations and history and minoring in
geography and art history, “but rivalries do form. The big one at
this year’s competition was between me and the captain of the Southeast
Team, a PhD student at the University of Tennessee.”
Reisser, the team’s co-founder along with graduate students Maxwell
Ruckdeschel and Jenny Brown, admitted to taking extra pride in the individual
scoring for the competition.
“His team did end up with the title, but in the individual scores
I was second in the nation and he was fourth,” said Reisser, who
also posted the highest individual total for an undergraduate this year
and last year.
In a geography bowl competition, teams compete for eight rounds of individual
and group questions. Group questions are similar to those on “Jeopardy,”
with a person buzzing in when they know the answer. Group questions are
more complex and the group has 30 seconds to answer correctly.
According to Reisser one of the more challenging team questions this year
asked members to identify the nicknames of several US city groupings including:
Dallas/Ft Worth (the Metroplex), Phoenix/Tempe (Valley of the Sun), &
Cedar Rapids/Moline/Rock Island/Davenport (The Quad Cities).
GW’s eight-student team is led by co-captains Ruckdeschel, a second-year
MA student in geography, and Reisser. Marie Price, associate professor
of geography and international affairs, is the team’s coach. In addition
to Ruckdeschel, Reisser and Brown, five other players joined the team
this year: graduate geography students Laura Vacherlon, Devin Keithley,
and Sarah Mosley; and undergraduates Pedro Martinez, a sophomore in geography,
and John Miller, a sophomore studying international affairs.
Leading up to the competition, the team trained in the Department of Geography’s
seminar room in 1957 E. St. Using atlases, textbooks, almanacs and glossaries
the players developed questions and quizzed each other in preparation
for queries such as list of major producers of various commodities, place-name
changes, technical terms or mapping techniques.
“The team is grateful for financial support from the Department of
Geography and the dean’s offices of the Columbian College and the
Elliott School,” said Price, “as well as The Association of
American Geographers, which provided financial support for travel and
registration.”
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu
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