Ivan Allen Alumna Competes on ‘Jeopardy!’

Posted January 12, 2018

The category: Georgia Institute of Technology alumni for $1,000.

The question: “Who is Lindsay Resnick?”

The answer: She is the 2013 Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts graduate who appeared on the syndicated game show Jeopardy! in January 2018.

“My Jeopardy! experience was the greatest of my life!” Resnick said after the two episodes she was in aired. Resnick won one game, and came in third in her second appearance.

Appearing on the show was ‘so much fun!’

Resnick, who said learning and trivia are passions, had been waiting to get on Jeopardy! since only a few months after she graduated in May 2013 with a Bachelor’s Degree in History, Technology, and Society from the School of History and Sociology, a unit of the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts.

It began with an online test in January 2014 and kicked into high gear in September, when she got the call that she had been picked to be on the show.

“For one month, I watched as many episodes as I could and scored myself during those practice sessions,” she said.

An anagram tripped her up.

Resnick’s two episodes were filmed on October 25.

“Everyone throughout the process was friendly and warm, and my favorite part of being on the show was getting to know my fellow contestants,” she said. “It was so much fun! I thought I would be nervous but I wasn’t.”

The question that gave her the most trouble was Final Jeopardy in her second game. The category was “Senators” and the clue, “The last names of these two current senators, one from Virginia and one from Massachusetts, are anagrams of each other.”

“I knew Elizabeth Warren was a senator from Massachusetts but I couldn’t think of the senators from Virginia or a suitable anagram for Warren in thirty seconds, so I wasn’t able to answer the question,” she said.

For the record, the answer would be Warren and Sen. Mark Warner.

‘Tech education has expanded my intellectual interests.’

Resnick, who after graduation went on to get a Master’s Degree in Heritage Preservation from Georgia State University in 2015, credited her Georgia Tech liberal arts education with helping her master categories in which she was not an expert.

“My HTS degree from Tech was much more well-rounded than a history degree I would’ve earned from another school,” she said.

She is now an archivist at the William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta. Her job is to help to preserve the history of the Savannah, Georgia’s Jewish community — one of the longest-established Jewish communities in the South.

“My Tech education has prepared me for the ‘real world’ in countless ways, but one of the most apparent to me is that I’ve learned to relate to many different personalities and people from all walks of life,” Resnick said.

“I also feel like my well-rounded liberal arts education at Tech has benefitted me because of its focus on science, technology, and medicine,” she said. “I was never interested in these topics before coming to Tech, but some of my favorite classes ended up being those, such as the History of Medicine. My Tech education has expanded my intellectual interests, and for that I will forever be grateful.”