CCEC hosts informative trivia night

Photo by Kimberlee Bongard

The Civic and Community Engagement Center held their second annual Quiz Bowl as a part of Community Engagement week. Dr. Walter T. Brown, a professor of history and international studies, and CCEC student coordinator Achyut Gautam emceed each round with questions about current events and global politics.

The four student teams Alpha Phi Omega (APO), International Student Organization (ISO), 4GotteN SuitCase and Rest of the World answered questions that were projected onto the screen in Friends Hall. Between rounds, audience members also had the chance to answer questions to win small prizes.

Achyut Gautam said, “The purpose of this is to just raise awareness to students about different issues that are going on, national and internationally as well. It’s mostly to make students engage civically, socially and politically, and just to have fun.”

In the opening round, the first few multiple choice style questions were about Black Lives Matter, like what activists founded the movement as well as the hashtag.

During the next segment, students had to guess what person was portrayed in pictures of important figures like Malala Yousafzai, Colin Kaepernick and Ajit Pai.

The correct answers from the next round of the Quiz Bowl, #MeToo vs. Fifty Shades of Grey, left many students stunned. Completely out of context, brief passages from either the “Fifty Shades of Grey” trilogy or tweets from women of the #MeToo movement would appear on screen for students to guess which source they originated from.

Many students mistook real-life statements from women about their grotesque encounters with sexual predators for fictitious quotes from “Fifty Shades of Grey.” In response to their surprise, Achyut Gautam explained, “The thing that looks like fiction is actually happening all around the world.”

The third round was coined “the buzzer round,” as each team received a miniature buzzer equipped with a different novelty sound effect. In prior rounds, the questions bounced from team to team, but questions in this round were fair game for whichever team hit the buzzer first.

From there, the questions ranged from which country has the largest refugee camp (Uganda) to what was the first college to implement a consent policy (Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio).

Throughout the Quiz Bowl, student teams traded the lead from round-to-round. In the end, the International Student Organization (ISO) won Amazon gift card prizes for accumulating the most points.

One of the winners from team ISO, sophomore Rojina Shrestha, said, “There were some things that I didn’t know about, but it was nice to see that everybody was so well informed about all the movements that’s going on.”

Sophomore Sagar Thapa said, “I would have liked it to happen every semester, because it brings a lot of issues to point. I learned a lot of things today from these slides too, and the questions. It’s fun and learning at the same time.”

 

kbongard@ramapo.edu