This year's much-anticipated and nerve-wracking Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee came to a close Thursday night with a tie for the title after three days of grueling competition. Vanya Shivashankar, 13, and Gokul Venkatachalam, 14, concentrated on their victory, successfully spelling "scherenschnitte" and "nunatak" respectively to seal the tie. A formidable 285 spellers made it to the national finals, with only Shivashankar and Venkatachalam winning. The former is a lifelong winner of Kansas' "Gifted Kids" quiz show and is the sibling of a former champion. The latter, whom CNN calls "the coolest guy," is from Missouri and a veteran of the competition - finishing third in 2014. Both are obviously super smart. But what about life after the spelling bee?
Since its founding nearly a century ago, the Scripps National Spelling Bee has become a beloved institution among Americans. The Louisville Courier-Journal started the event in 1925 with nine contestants. In 1941, the spelling bee expanded and Scripps Howard took over sponsorship of the contest. The spelling bee was suspended for a few years due to the United States' involvement in World War II (1943-45), and has continued ever since. And the rewards are good. This year's generous awards include a $30,000 cash prize from Scripps, a $2,500 U.S. Savings Bond and reference library from Merriam-Webster Dictionary, and a $1,100 reference book from Encyclopedia Britannica. With such a vast store of wealth and knowledge, the world is sure to be at your disposal. What Shivashankar and Venkatachalam do next is up to them. But what the former champion has achieved could be a sign of things to come.
Frank Neuhauser
The first competition in 1925 was won by Frank Neuhauser, who won by spelling the world "gladiolus" correctly. According to the New York Times , Neuhauser, who died in 2011, earned $500 in gold coins for his precocious puberty. The Kentucky native later earned an engineering degree from the University of Louisville and a law degree from George Washington University. He worked first as a patent attorney at General Electric Company and later as a patent attorney at Bernard Rothwell & Brown in Washington. He appeared in the 2002 documentary "Spellbound" and was a guest on several spelling bees in his later years.
Jon Pennington
The 1986 recipient ("odontalgia," meaning toothache) is now a federal contractor in Washington, working for "a small agency" within the Department of Defense. Although Pennington was personally diagnosed with bipolar disorder in college, he recently told Time magazine that scandal has not plagued the Spelling star's life. "Nobody ... lives under a bridge or cracks under the pressure," he said. "I haven't heard of any horror stories about the cast of Diff'rent Strokes or child actors gone bad. They all seem like normal people. The only thing unusual about them is that they tend to be very smart and have very long memories. , and often have more degrees than the average person.”
Stephanie Pettit
Pettit won the 1987 contest, and her final spell was "staph." She graduated at the top of her high school class before studying law. She is now the principal of a small law firm in San Francisco and dedicates her legal skills to nonprofits such as the Polly Klaas Foundation, The Nature Conservancy, and MoveOn.org. She credits the spelling bee with teaching her important life lessons. "I learned how you prepare yourself and then you have to let go. Luck is one of the things that goes into winning a bee," she told TIME . “Now, outside of work, I try not to get involved in competitive activities.”
Raga Ramachandran
Ramachandran, the 1988 bee winner, spelled the word "elegiacal" correctly, but he still struggled with the difficult-to-pronounce words. She is a physician and assistant professor at the University of California, San Francisco, where she studies "markers expressed by tumors in hepatocellular carcinoma and metastasis to the liver."
Scott Isaacs
Isaacs, who won the 1989 competition with the brilliant word "spoliator" (meaning "robber, plunder or plunder"), may have become the anti-predator - steadfastly focused on constructive, all-encompassing pursuits. Isaacs, a graduate of Russian and Environmental Sciences, now practices chiropractic and naturopathic medicine in Denver. Despite his achievement, Isaacs told TIME that he still considers winning the spelling bee to be the most important experience of his life. After all, “How many people can say they were number one in their field at one point in their lives?”
Wendy Lai
In 1996, the cruel word "vivisepulture" - which refers to the act of burying someone alive - won the 1996 competition at the age of 12. Now 31, with degrees in economics and education, she appears to have left behind the hyper-competitive spirit required of bees to focus on motherhood. She told ABC News she wasn't sure whether her two sons, ages 2 and 3, would continue to compete. “My oldest son is really into the Ninja Turtles now, and they’re so little,” she said. "It will be a while before we see if they are interested in anything other than Donatello and Michelangelo."
One thing that seems to unite many of the former recipients is an abiding love of bees. Every year, former champions and contestants flock to the national finals just to bask in the rarefied, obsessive atmosphere of the spelling bee. Jacques Bailly won the 1980 competition with "elucubrate" and went on to study Greek, German, French, Latin and Arabic, explaining to The Washington Post last year: "It has become It's part of your personality that you have a deep interest in words that continues to show up in your life... These kids are intellectuals and it's so interesting that you want to help them."
Rebecca Sealfon, a former champion who bucked the trend by winning in 1997, has less glowing reviews of the experience. In 2012, she wrote an article in The Daily Beast comparing bees to "The Hunger Games." "The spelling bee is a very American game; Americans especially enjoy watching winners win and losers lose," she wrote. "There is no reason to pit such talented people against each other...the event would be just as much fun if we celebrated all of our talents."
But in other ways, Sealfon fits the bill. According to The Guardian , the former champion is only 28 years old and has already earned three degrees, worked as a software engineer and started his own research career.
Image: Getty Images; UCLA People; Hunan TV; The Tonight Show, Scripps Spelling Bee
