University Challenge

Here at the University the staff have very good ways of contacting students. The most obvious is email but there are also sms messages, facebook groups and good old fashioned mail; thankfully, they can't send letters to your parents. Perhaps the most innovative, and sometimes annoying is message of the day.

Message of the day is a pop-up that shows up whenever you start up a computer at the University. It is a list of all the goings-on and any information that staff want to pass to students. It is here that I saw the line:

"Do you want to take part in University Challenge?"

Why not I thought. I clicked on the link and it told me to go to the students' union that afternoon.

I had heard about the University Challenge heats at other Universities; you have to answer questions against around forty other people who will eventually be whittled down to the final four with one substitute. If I can just make it into the final four then I'll be happy, even if we don't end up on telly.

I turned up at the students' union to find a room with five other people inside, one of whom was asking the questions. The other four students were mainly based around Engineering and History and were undergraduates - who would answer the questions on classical music and biology that they seem to so frequently ask.

The heats were made up of 25 questions which were supposed to be University Challenge style - and they were relatively hard questions such as:

which four countries make up BRIC?

what post-impressionist technique was used by Seurat?

But the hardest question by a long way was:

what were the full names of the children in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?

Not surprisingly, I managed to get into the team. With only five people it was not hard to get into a team of five but I was slightly surprised that I got into the four that would be going to audition for the televised show.

We heard from Granada Studios a few weeks later, which we thought was strange as the show is on BBC2. Apparently they make it though. It is lucky because Granada Studios is practically in Salford, being situated on the Manchester side of the River Irwell. Granada wanted us to turn up at their studios for a qualifying round, there are 240 teams invited to this stage and only 28 can make it through to the televised rounds.

We turned up 15 minutes early and were treated very well by Granada, well we were potentially guests on one of their shows. We were invited up to see the producer of the show and on the way saw another team being led away from their interview; we gave them the obligatory evil-eyes and were then shown in to our audition.

It all started very well, the producer received her degree from Salford University and hadn't had a team for four years audition from Salford. The question setter for the programme was also there and he put on a tape of actual questions which we had to answer individually and our scores would be put together to see how strong we are.

The questions were very hard, we were warned of that before we started, much harder than the first rounds of the actual televised show and only seven seconds to write down the answer for each one and move onto the next one. I don't remember much about the questions but one I think I remember goes like this:

If an object has a rest mass of 1kg what mass does it have at 2/3 of the speed of light?

Seven seconds! More like seven minutes. I think we did OK though between us we were quite confident of the answers for most of the questions when we went through it afterwards. It was at the end of the audition that the producer said something that we did not want to here.

"It is unfortunate that your team consists of four white males and doesn't reflect the diversity that is present at the University of Salford"

It is true that the University has an incredibly diverse range of cultures and that the gender split is pretty equal, it just happened that the four of us read the message on that particular day. We still maintain that it was positive discrimination which kept us out of the competition and not poor knowledge, but I guess we'll never know.