I won the 2017 Jeopardy College Championship, which led me to getting a lot of media attention, especially for my memetic Final Jeopardy response. I was then invited to compete on the 2017 Jeopardy Tournament of Champions, where I got to the semifinals.
My stats on Jeopardy can be found on J-Archive. My old (not very impressive) NAQT trivia stats can be found here.
Since Jeopardy is a national show, below is only a selection of the articles written about me, chosen either for notability, for actually interviewing me or for providing a different perspective.
Throughout my time at MIT as an undergraduate and graduate student, I have felt called upon to speak truth to power. Below is a compilation of articles that either use my picture or quote me directly. In this space, I’ve tried to focus on what other people have written about the situation. My own write-ups on what happened are either repeated here or can be found in my Writing page.
In 2022, I worked on the “Get Out the Vote” campaign for the MIT grad student unionization campaign. While I had known about the unionization effort from the start, I only had enough energy to be involved in the last few months of the election campaign. We ultimately were successful, winning with a 2:1 margin.
In March 2020, as it became increasingly clear that COVID-19 was present in the United States, MIT and many other schools decided to evict all of its students. While this was a wise public health decision, the execution was slapdash and needlessly cruel to international students and students with unsafe home lives. These students were denied promised exemptions, forcing mass student action to overturn these initial decisions.
Over Fall 2019, it became clear that MIT had taken money from Jeffrey Epstein and undertaken steps to anonymize / hide that donations were made. In the process of protesting this, I accidentally started a flame war on a department mailing list which led to Richard Stallman making misogynistic comments. This was the last straw for a decades-long pattern, eventually leading to his resignation.
A contemporary chronological summary of events from my perspective can be read here. A 2023 summary and reflection of the events that I wrote as part of my interview prep for the Schmidt Science Fellows can be read here.
In the 2014-2015 school year, “dorm security” became a subcontracted position, replacing student workers and creating an unwelcome environment, as summarized here, here, and here. My frustration with these rules led me to first conduct my own surveys and then later chair the Undergraduate Association’s (UA’s) Committee on Student-Administration Collaboration.
As the chair of the UA Committee on Student-Administration Collaboration, I was one of the key student government officials when student-admin relations fell through. This happened most dramatically with the forced closure of the Senior House dorm, as summarized contemporaneously here and here.
Articles with a personal focus that don’t fit any of the above categories