Finals reveal Imperial University Challenge team
Cross-College team members set their sights on Paxman
Internal contests for Imperial’s University Challenge selection took place last week in the Blackett lab, with the initial tryouts on Thursday 3 November seeing attendance figures upwards of 130 students hoping to get onto the team. Sixty questions sent in by the show were asked in the space of an hour with those who fell within the top sixteen by scoring at least 24 out of 60 making it through to the next round.
The finals were held last Wednesday mimicking the University Challenge format, consisting of four 20-minute matches with winners and losers from the first two playing off against each other until a winning team was formed. Gilead Amit and Ciaran Healy, from the 2009 team, were present and read the questions while helping with the judging. The tournament exhausted the list of official University Challenge questions provided, with scores of 95-90 for the final along with close scores of 90-85 for the first match.
Elliot Bajema commented that after the questions were used up, they were “still not satisfied [they] had seen enough to make a good decision” and therefore 8 selected candidates were chosen for an additional round with a harder set of questions from a previous tournament. This match ended with score 110-65.
The lineup for the 2012 series will be: Pietro Aronica (Chemistry 1st Year MRes + PhD), Dominic Cottrell (Medicine 4th Year), Martin Evans (Pharmacology and Translational Medical Science 3rd Year) and Henry Guille (Materials Science 3rd Year) with Ashwin Braude (Physics 1st Year) in reserve.
Matt Allinson, a self-confessed “die-hard fan of the show” who competed in the finals, commented to Felix saying he was “amazed at how much easier it is at home on the sofa... as opposed to gathered around a table with 3 strangers, an opposing team, and an audience.” Allinson extended congratulations to the main team, saying “I think with them on board we stand a damn good chance of doing well this year”, noting that “the organisers did their best to take it seriously but keep it fun.”
The team’s first challenge will be to compete against teams from Oxford, Manchester, Sheffield and Oxford Brookes in the Academic Competition Federation (ACF) Quiz, held in Oxford on Saturday 12 November. Filming for the 2012 series of University Challenge will begin in February, with the show set to broadcast in July 2012.
