On Feb. 5, 2015 defending champion Carlmont’s Friends of Millard Fillmore club received its second trophy in two years.
Every year since Dr. Robert Hunter started FOMF in 1969, Carlmont has been participating in the trivia hunt that occurs on the weekend of Feb. 2.
FOMF is a trivia hunt in which high schools compete against each other where students answer questions and gain points for their schools.
“We recruit a bunch of FOMFers to come and help us answer these questions that the FOMF organization gives us. The students pick their questions and try to find the answer and proofs for the question in order to help Carlmont win,” said FOMF captain Karim Abedrabbo. ” It’s fun because you feel the pressure to finish your question quickly and find the books that you need because it’s actually really hard to prove your answer. They’re not easy questions.”
Last year Carlmont took the throne from Castilleja High School after their run of four consecutive wins. This year, Carlmont extended their winning run to two years after beating Castilleja by a close margin of one point.
Sophomore Jonathan Li said, “Of course winning is a great feeling due to the hard work and perseverance that we put into the questions. I am content with this year’s victory, and we can look forward to doing even better.”
The FOMF trivia hunt is based off a point system, with questions being worth more points as the questions gets more and more difficult.
“We give a packet containing the questions to all the FOMFers, and they choose what question they want. There are certain questions worth more points and certain questions worth less points, depending on how hard the answer and proofs are to find,” said Abedrabbo.
For each question the students assigned to the question must find the answer to the question and find hard evidence of that answer.
Sophomore Jessica Chang said, “It was hard because my group had a really hard question. We had to go to a lot of different libraries and look up a lot of different books. It took us all of Friday night and a couple of hours on Saturday to find the answer, but it was relieving when we finally found it.”
Carlmont once again took home the honors of this competition, and are preparing to continue their winning streak in next year’s competition.
The Friends of Millard Fillmore Club meets every Thursday at D-27 to prepare for the next FOMF trivia hunt.
