Photo: Courtesy Jeopardy!Vinita Kailasanath might want to find a good accountant.
The Stanford sophomore earned a handsome payoff in November when she defeated finalists from USC and Florida State to win the Jeopardy! College Tournament. Kailasanath won $50,000, a new Volvo and a $25,000 general-fund scholarship for Stanford in her quiz show victory, recorded at UCLA’s Pauley Pavilion and televised November 21.
Although she was comfortably ahead in the championship round, Kailasanath needed to correctly answer the Final Jeopardy question to secure her victory.The category: cities of the world. The answer is: the Portuguese named a Ceylonese city after this famous explorer in 1513.
“I knew that the capital of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, was Colombo,” she says. The correct response “had to be Christopher Columbus.”
Kailasanath, who says her strongest categories are art history and biology, claims she didn’t cram for the competition. “I really didn’t have time. I had too much schoolwork to do.”
Asked what she planned to do with the money she won, Kailasanath told host Alex Trebek: “Pay back my parents.”
