A Denton student bested fourteen others to emerge as the winner in this year’s Jeopardy College Championship.
Monica Thieu, an eighteen-year-old college sophomore at the University of North Texas’s Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science, is the youngest-ever winner in the 23-year history of the Jeopardy College Championship, the Denton Record Chronicle pointed out.
Thieu, who previously attended the Hockaday School, was gracious about her victory in an interview with the Record Chronicle: “I didn’t feel like I would do horribly, but I didn’t think I’d win it,” Thieu said. (Watch a video about Thieu discussing her victory.)
But what makes Thieu’s victory even sweeter is that if she were not a student at TAMS, she’d still be a high school senior. “TAMS is a two-year residential program that allows talented students to complete their freshman and sophomore years of college while receiving the equivalent of high school diplomas,” Diane Smith explained in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
In the final round, Thieu beat out two college seniors, 21-year-old Zack Terrill of Vanderbilt and 22-year-old Sarah Bart of Goucher College. In Final Jeopardy, Thieu furnished the correct question (“What is Afghanistan?”) for the statement “The 14 countries that border China run alphabetically from this to Vietnam.”
Thieu plans on using her $100,000 prize towards college tuition. She hopes to attend Stanford or the University of Southern California and major in major in neuropsychology.
