Battling competition-day nerves, 13-year-old Steven Jiang woke up at 4 a.m. Thursday to get one last study session in before the 2023 Citywide Spelling Bee Championship.
Steven, a third-year competitor, faced off against 47 other Chicago Public Schools students at 8 a.m. sharp. By 1:30, he had out-spelled them all.
In May, he will head to a national spelling bee for a chance to win more than $50,000.
Students in grades one through eight within CPS are eligible for the citywide bee every year, said CPS spokesperson Sylvia Barragan.
This year, only students in grades five through eight made the cut.
“This was my last chance,” said Steven, an eighth grader at Whitney Young Magnet High School. “I felt like I had to make the most of it. And so I worked very hard.”
Steven clinched his win by correctly spelling the word “saturnine,” (defined as “slow and gloomy”). He bested second-place finisher Evelyn Lust, a sixth grader at Coonley Elementary School.
The tournament was single-elimination. One mistake sent bee hopefuls out of the hive.
Steven nearly tripped over the word “phlebotomy” early in the tournament, then remembered struggling with the word in practice.
“As soon as I heard it, I kind of felt actually relieved because I knew that I had identified my mistakes in the past,” he said.
Ahead of the regional competition, contestants received a list of 4,000 potential words from the Merriam-Webster Unabridged Dictionary.
Every day, Steven and his mother would run down the list together, looking up the pronunciation and meaning of each word and highlighting words he didn’t know.
Leading up to Thursday’s event, Steven studied spelling words for four to six hours a day.
“Everyone has studied. Especially at the end, you can tell that they know what they’re doing,” Steven said of his competitors. “I respect all of them. They put in a lot of work.”
While studying, Steven likes to snack on salt-and-pepper pistachios. He doesn’t use specific strategies to memorize words, but he reads books in his free time to expand his vocabulary.
His favorite books include “To Kill a Mockingbird,” “Lord of the Flies” and “1984.”
CPS is one of more than 175 partner organizations hosting regional competitions throughout February and March for the 2023 Scripps National Spelling Bee.
Steven plans to study for an hour a day before the national competition near Washington, D.C., in May. He could win up to $52,500.
“It’s very heavy, and also a lot of fun — so competitive,” Steven’s father, Zi Feng Jiang, said. “This is a really good activity to challenge the students.”
The spelling bee “gives [students] a certain measure of confidence, to be up there, to present themselves, to hold themselves up in front of a crowd,” Barragan said.
Once his bee eligibility ends, Steven’s hopes for the future are wide open. He said he plans to continue running track at Whitney Young while maintaining the work ethic that the spelling bee taught him.
“Spelling bee taught me that, you know, hard work pays off,” Steven said. “It’s a lot of time and effort and energy.”
Correction: In an earlier version of this story, second-place finisher Evelyn Lust’s surname was misspelled.
