Those with the ability to spell were given their chance to shine.
Ottawa University held its first annual spelling bee in the O’Dell Lounge of Martin Hall March 24. Brown Hall Residential Assistants Josh Hall and Carl Prieto designed the program as a way to do something different for students while having fun at the same time.
“Carl and I felt like it had never been done before,” Hall said. “We figured since most of us did it in grade school, why not do it in college?”
Hall said the competition featured separate rounds, with the first round being somewhat of a “warm-up” round, while the next rounds of spelling progressively became more difficult. The two program organizers said they hadn’t thought of which words they would use yet, but may have to use the internet as a resource.
“We are in college, so the words will have to be pretty hard,” Hall said. “We’ll have anywhere between 100 to 200 words.”
Freshman Chris Douglas competed in the spelling bee, but came up short on the word “maintenance.”
“It was frustrating to lose, but I still don’t think I can spell that word right,” he said.
As a judge, Hall thought the student turnout was great, and looks forward to doing it again in the future.
“Students came out to re-live childhood memories and have fun doing a different program,” he said.
Junior Jake McMillian won the competition, citing the university as a contributing factor to his victory.
“It meant a lot to win this,” he said. “It means all of this great OU education’s going to something.”
McMillian said his winning word wasn’t even his hardest one.
“I won on the word ‘nihilism,’ but it wasn’t very hard because it only had eight letters,” he said. “I thought that ‘baccalaureate’ was pretty hard.”
Douglas thought that the whole idea of the spelling bee was great for students.
“To come up with an idea that didn’t cost a lot of money and bring in a lot of students was a huge success to me,” he said.