UMW alum Becca Arm ’16 walked away from a recent episode of the long-running TV game show Jeopardy! with $27,500 and a second-place finish.
Now employed as a library assistant, Arm served as a special collections student assistant in the Simpson Library during her time at UMW.
“She was a wonderful library assistant, very detail-oriented and a very good writer,” said UMW Head of Special Collections Carolyn Parsons. “We’re excited to see that she’s gone into the library profession.”
Arm was a fierce contestant on Jeopardy!, leading her competitors – a management consultant and the returning champion, an ESL teacher – for most of the game.
She tore through categories like “1817,” “design & architecture” and “children’s books” in the show’s first round, finishing in the lead with $9,000. In the second round, she muscled through topics including “similes,” “entertaining fruits & vegetables” and “Biblical pairs,” maintaining the lead with $22,200. Arm also snagged one Daily Double in each of the game’s first two segments.
In Final Jeopardy, she questioned the answer – “His First novel, from 1920, incorporated some of his pieces from The Nassau, a Princeton literary magazine” – correctly (F. Scott Fitzgerald) but wagered only $5,300, which left her just short of winning the game.
Arm, who lives in Herndon, Virginia, majored in art history and was a scholarship recipient at Mary Washington. She is interested in onomastics, the study of names, she told the show’s host, Alex Trebek, who admitted to being unfamiliar with the topic.
“It can be any kind of name, but I’m interested in personal names, given names. I like to watch what’s in the media, what’s going on in the news, see what’s going to become popular as a baby name,” Arm told Trebek. “It’s kind of fun.”
