Isaac Applebaum has made it to the Jeopardy! College finals. He is a junior at Stanford University, majoring in Computational Biology. Applebaum is from Bethesda and graduated from Richard Montgomery High School in 2019, where he also played on the baseball team and ran cross country. Applebaum is also a musician, a jazz pianist, which he says is a big part of his identity.
In the first quarterfinals matchup of the two-week Jeopardy College Championship, Applebaum pulled off a comeback win to defeat Gus Guszkowski of Dartmouth and Catherine Zhang of Cornell. He won by correctly identifying Charles Torrey as the abolitionist thought to have given the Underground Railroad its name during final Jeopardy.
He did it again in the semifinals when he was $1,800 behind first place at the end of the Double Jeopardy round before identifying “irises” as what a 1525 textbook on anatomy states is being so different of colours and could also be called rainbows.
In an interview with ABC7, he talked about what he missed the most about the DMV. “One thing I miss about the DMV is seasons. Because in the Bay Area, the weather is the same every single day. You wake up, you go outside, it’s like 50, 60 degrees, it’s sunny, there are a couple of clouds and then in winter, it rains sometimes, but no snow. It’s not like fall. The weather is kind of the same. And I like that, as someone who has to bike to class and be outside, but also when I was home over winter break, we had these beautiful snow days. And we were all just like, go outside and walk around and that there’s nothing like that in the Bay Area. So I miss the snow in the winter. I miss all the leaves changing colors in the fall. I do not necessarily miss all the rain that we get in the DC area.”
Applebaum has the opportunity to win $250,000 become Jeopardy! National College Champion if he were to win on Tuesday, February 22nd.
Jess Agyepong, a Paint Branch High School alumna, also participated in Jeopardy! College. She’s a senior majoring in biology at Howard University and risked it all when she went to Final Jeopardy tied for first in her quarterfinal matchup. Unfortunately, she came up short in a valiant effort.
