This Georgia student just won $100,000 playing Jeopardy. Who is “Raymond Goslow?” The Kennesaw State University senior just finished competing in Jeopardy’s national college championship and, on Feb. 22, made it to the final round and walked away with the second-place title. He joined “City Lights” host Lois Reitzes via Zoom to share his remarkable achievement.
Interview highlights:
A day in the life of a Jeopardy aspirant:
“There’s a really useful website that many people use to prepare for Jeopardy. It’s called ‘J-archive.com,’ and it has pretty much all the questions and answers that have ever been used on Jeopardy, and you can just scroll through and get a really good feel for the kinds of topics that are on Jeopardy,” said Goslow.
“I think what really helped me get to be on the show was just a positive attitude towards life in general because that makes you want to absorb all the information and knowledge you can – just realizing that there’s so much knowledge in the world, and you’ll never learn all of it, but just to be really excited to learn a little more of it each day,” Goslow said. “That will help you get the knowledge you need.”
KSU school spirit on the Jeopardy stage:
“So by representing KSU in this tournament, I didn’t just represent KSU, but I think I represented other similar schools across the country. Pretty much all of the schools in this tournament were private schools or flagship public schools, and I think, of all of them, Kennesaw State was the only one that would be considered a lesser-known state school,” Goslow said. “So it felt not just like representing KSU specifically, but everyone across the country who is taking that path for their education.”
“I also went to community college before I transferred to KSU, and I’ve had a non-traditional path in that I was working full-time for a lot of college, so I really felt like I was representing all the people who took a non-traditional path through college. And that felt really cool. A little bit of pressure, but really cool to make sure that those people had a voice and a representation in this tournament.”
Behind the scenes at the KSU-hosted watch party:
“Knowing the outcome made me a little nervous because I knew that as opposed to my previous games that I won to get into the finals, I didn’t win this game. And so I was worried a little that I was going to let people down, especially when in the first game I went into final Jeopardy in third place.”
Goslow continued, “But the energy in the room was just amazing. They had the campus radio station and cheerleaders and all of that, and everyone was just so supportive. And towards the end, when I went on like a really good streak and got, like, six high-value answers in a row, just the atmosphere was so electric with people excited to see me making that comeback. So it was just an incredible atmosphere.”
