Issue 1854 News

"Once you're already ahead, it's a lot more relaxing..."

Imperial's University Challenge team speaks to Felix about their first round triumph over Manchester

Mohammad Majlisi

18 Oct 2024 — 5 min read

When asked if it was stressful quizzing underneath the studio lights for their first televised round in University Challenge, team captain Matthew Spry said, “I think I really got into the zone, and I think I managed to just tune out the fact that the cameras… and the lights are on. I just sort of played it like a regular quiz.” Imperial’s recent success in the competition – where it had won three of its five titles in the years 2020, 2022, and 2024 – meant the team had “big shoes to fill”, according to Spry.

The team, consisting of captain Matthew Spry (PhD Electrical Chemistry, in the Department of Materials), Charlotte Stokes (MSc Applied Genomics), Mattia Elkouby (undergraduate Chemistry), Jaime Salamanca Camacho (MSc Quantum Fields and Fundamental Forces), and reserve Carlos Doebeli (PhD Applied Mathematics), were joined by last year’s team member Justin Lee, on our interview call.

Each of the team’s members have their strengths and weaknesses. Matthew is “decent at art, geography, history, and politics.” Mattia’s strengths were “Chemistry... and usually geography”, but Matthew and Jaime were also quite strong on this for this year’s competition. Mattia also learnt “random bits of history” and poetry. Charlotte was strong on biology, as well as “some of the more pop culture stuff like film and TV,” she explained. She was “quite good at literature, but definitely had some spots” in her knowledge. Jaime, who wasn’t present, was described as knowledgeable about “everything.” Charlotte described her teammate as knowing about “the stuff you’ve never heard of.” Carlos chimes in “anything to do with Spain”, and “maths and physics”. Matthew also describes him as someone who’s “born in the wrong century.” As a team, literature was their weakness, so they divided up the trivia they needed to learn together.

Describing their first match against the University of Manchester, where Imperial won by an impressive 310-75 points, Matthew credits gaining an early lead with their team's victory. “Once, you're already ahead, it's a lot more relaxing, you can sort of enjoy it. You feel more confident, buzzing in when you know you're not actually taking a risk and costing your team by buzzing in with the wrong answer.” He also spoke of their approach to the first round: “We went into it thinking, you know, just don't get battered in the first round. We went in wanting to win the whole thing, but the worst thing is to go at the first round and just get turned over by another team.” Mattia expands on this further: “Also... we don't want to get destroyed in the first round and suddenly look like the weakest team like ever pitched by Imperial in the last, I don’t know, 10 years.”

Manchester was the team to beat. “The only team who could have caught a lead in this competition were Manchester,” Matthew explains. It, along with Magdalen College, Oxford, have both won four titles each, putting them joint second to Imperial. “I wonder if they did that deliberately. I think they might have paired Manchester and Imperial together for that reason.”

Mattia’s experience last year as reserve meant he was quite useful in managing the pressure of competition. He explained: “Obviously it was nice to be reserved last year, and I got to see how everything worked, and I got to be in the studios, which meant this year I was far less stressed than the others about it. Like, I remember before our first episode, everyone was kind of shaky and it didn’t really affect me that much."

Imperial College's University Challenge team in their first bout against Manchester, with their mascot Titus (left). **BBC**

This year’s mascot is Titus, a plushie Titanosaur Jaime sourced from the Natural History Museum. Mattia explains their plan for the soft toy: “We wanted to do the same thing as Justin's team had done with the mascot with like Little Otter the year before, which was, add a new piece of clothing to the mascot after each victory.”

Due to the teams’ almost concurrent successes, the Imperial Dynasty has been born, with previous winners sharing their knowledge and helping train the latest competitors in the competition. This is Justin’s second year on the selection committee. Imperial alum and 2022 winner Fatima Sheriff is also part of the selection process. She has also continued quizzing on television, competing on Only Connect on the same day Imperial beat Manchester. “There are four different locations and times for people to get into the first round and for the second round,” Justin says. He has also noted a rise in people joining, “I remember having an uptick in prospective Singaporeans,” he told me, recalling this occurred after 2022, after supremo Max Zheng performed astoundingly well. “Some of them tried to ask for his autograph,” he continues.

The University Challenge team operates seperately to Quiz Society, with its own independent committee and selection process, and running its own independent trials. Anyone can attend, regardless of affiliation with Quiz Society. Justin explained the format: “There are two rounds of trials, one of them split across four venues and four dates. There are a total of 100 questions for applicants to answer and divide it into two columns. There's the confidence column – if you get it right, you get two points. If you get it wrong, you lose a point. There's a not so confident column you if you get it right, you get one point. If you don't get it right, you get nothing.

“So, we generally select the applicants with the highest answer scores, but if we see someone with some specialty that we are interested in or someone that mesh well with some other people skills, we would consider them as well. And so the best dozen or so people will be on the second round of the trial. And then we press buzzers and see who gets the answer first and see how they how they function as a team and then after that we will spend a week or so selecting a team.”

Mattia explained that experience is not necessary: “People can just come to their trials without having prepared anything. Just come and maybe even the knowledge they've already accumulated in their life will be enough to do incredibly well in the test. They don't have to psych themselves out and tell themselves it's not possible because someone like Jaime on the team, who had never actually done a quiz before, did the best out of anyone.”

Curious about running this year? Quiz Soc are running four trials this year: