About The Carleton Program

The Carleton quizbowl team is one of the oldest continuously-running clubs in the country, having been active since the late 1980s. In recent years, we have sent teams to many regional tournaments in Minnesota, Iowa, and Illinois as well as national championship tournaments in Chicago, Dallas, Maryland, and Pittsburgh. Highlights of the program's history include undergraduate national championships in 1999 and 2007 and a Division II national championship in 2008, while in the last two years the team has finished 3rd among undergraduate teams twice and placed 7th overall at the 2011 Intercollegiate Championship Tournament.

We invite all Carleton students to join the team, regardless of background or skill level. Playing in high school is not a requirement--indeed, two of our best players the past two years didn't play until arriving at Carleton. We practice twice a week (Monday and Wednesday nights, generally) and practices are open to all. In addition, we frequently send multiple teams to tournaments, so just about anyone who wants to can attend most tournaments.

If you have more questions about the team or getting involved, please contact Frank Firke (the president) at firkef AT carleton dot edu or Carsten Gehring (the treasurer) at gehrinca AT carleton dot edu.

About Quizbowl

Quizbowl is a competitive activity that tests knowledge in a wide variety of (mostly academic) disciplines. It's somewhat comparable to Jeopardy!, but played in teams using questions that are a lot longer and cover a much wider variety of topics in much more depth. Quizbowl is played at the high school, college, and open levels--for obvious reasons, our team mostly attends college-level tournaments, though we usually host a few high school tournaments each year for fundraising purposes.

For more information, you should check out the quizbowl wiki here; for the especially curious, lots of quizbowl news and discussion can be found at the forums here.