National Spelling Bee champions say it set them up for success: 'You attain a level of mastery'

Joanne Lagatta arrived at the University of Wisconsin in 1995 with a flawless academic record and an achievement on her resumé that she didn't like to talk about — but that no other undergrad on the sprawling Madison campus could claim: Scripps National Spelling Bee champion.

The bee winner in 1991 at age 13, Lagatta nonetheless struggled adjusting to life outside her rural hometown of Clintonville, Wisconsin — until she got a push from a professor who was a devoted spelling-bee fan.

“I went in thinking I was a smart kid who had won a National Spelling Bee, and I must be able to compete with the highest-level academic kids. I signed up for a bunch of advanced classes I clearly had no place being in. I thought I was going to fail my chemistry class,” Lagatta says. “I went to my professor. He stared me down and said, ‘I know who you are. I know what you’re capable of. You are not failing my class.' He pushed me through that class. I certainly didn't get an A, but I didn't fail.”

Lagatta, now 47, turned out fine. She's a neonatologist at Children's Wisconsin, a hospital in Milwaukee. And like many former champions of the National Spelling Bee — which celebrates its 100th anniversary when it starts Tuesday at a convention center outside Washington — she says the competition changed her life for the better because it taught her she could do hard things.

Winners of the spelling bee aren't celebrities, exactly. Those who competed before it was televised by ESPN — it now airs on Scripps-owned ION — aren't often recognized by strangers. But they have to accept being known forever for something they accomplished in middle school. Google any past bee champion, and it's one of the first things that pops up.

Many past champions have remained involved with the bee. Jacques Bailly, the 1980 champion, is the bee's longtime pronouncer. Paige Kimble, who won a year later, ran the bee as executive director from 1996-2020. Vanya Shivashankar, the 2015 co-champ, returns each spring as master of ceremonies, and her older sister, Kavya, is one of several former champs on the panel that selects words for the competition.

Even for those former champs who've moved on entirely, the competition has remained a cornerstone of their lives. The Associated Press spoke to seven champs about their membership in this exclusive club.

Anamika Veeramani, the 2010 champion, graduated from Yale in three years and got her medical degree at Harvard. A resident in plastic and reconstructive surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, she is training to become a craniofacial surgeon, and the focused and disciplined approach that led her to the spelling bee title has been a throughline in her life since.

“You attain a level of mastery over a subject that you wouldn't have otherwise, and that feeling of mastery is very similar across fields,” the 29-year-old Veeramani says. “Once you know a subject well enough, you're able to really just play with that subject and and come up with things, and there's just a joy and delight in what you're doing. ... I'm going to spend the rest of my career in surgery chasing that.”

Molly Baker was never uncomfortable about her past as the 1982 spelling-bee champion, and in the right context, she's happy to bring it up — as an icebreaker or a standout line on her resumé.

“Oh, I was never cool,” Baker says. “I knew people who were state tennis champs, and they were, you know, in their own way equally as nerdy. I would always joke about it, that I was queen of the dorks.”

Baker, 55, worked as a staff writer at the Wall Street Journal and wrote a book, “High Flying Adventures in the Stock Market.” She's now a freelance journalist, and she says there's no question her spelling bee title helped her career.

“One summer in college I was an intern at, it was called ‘Real Life with Jane Pauley.’ It was an evening magazine TV news show,” Baker says. “And that, I'm sure, was partly a result of having been interviewed on the ‘Today’ show by Jane Pauley in 1982. I was not shy about saying that when I applied.”

Jon Pennington knew he was socially awkward when he won the bee in 1986. He even wore his mother's bulky sunglasses on the bee stage because the bright lights bothered him.

When he was 40, he was diagnosed with autism, a condition he proudly embraces.

“I did not win the National Spelling Bee in spite of my autism. I did not win the National Spelling Bee by triumphing over my autism. I won the National Spelling Bee because of my autism,” the 53-year-old Pennington says. “For me, it almost felt like if you hear a chord played on a piano but there's a dissonant note in that chord, that's what it felt like when you came across a misspelling.”

Pennington, who lives in Minneapolis with his wife and dog, worked for years in corporate human resources and is now working as a writer, collaborating on an as-yet unpublished biography of songwriter Eden Ahbez. He still loves academic competitions and word games, and he has had crossword puzzles published by the Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times.

Even among spelling champions, Nupur Lala's name inspires reverence and awe. Her victory in 1999 was later chronicled in a documentary, “Spellbound,” and she kicked off a quarter-century of Indian Americans dominating the bee. That doesn't mean it was easy to be known for her linguistic brilliance.

“One thing that really stood out about John (Masko), my very soon-to-be husband: Every man I had dated before never wanted to play any sort of word game with me. They would avoid doing the crossword puzzle, refused to play Scrabble,” the 40-year-old Lala says. “I realized this man was special among so many reasons because he was the first man who was willing to play Scrabble with me consistently, and now I would say we're pretty even in Scrabble ability.”

At this point, Masko chimes in via speakerphone: “She's still much better at crossword puzzles!”

Lala works as a neuro-oncologist at Dartmouth Health in Lebanon, New Hampshire. She prescribes chemotherapy and coordinates management of brain and spine tumors. And she has a theory about why spelling champions pursue medicine or neuroscience — because they're already intrigued by how the brain works.

“One thing I was really fascinated by after participating in spelling bees is eidetic memory. Things you've seen in the past flash as pictures in your head, and that occurred for me during the spelling bee,” Lala says. “When I went to medical school, I didn't expect this at all, I picked neurology because I was so interested in preserving faculties like language that really make people who they are.”

Kerry Close Guaragno won the 2006 bee in her fifth appearance at nationals and learned plenty about perseverance along the way.

“Looking at these kids who seemed so smart and so experienced, it seemed almost incomprehensible that I could win the competition one day,” said the 32-year-old Guaragno, who works for Group Gordon, a New York City-based public relations firm.

“I'm an endurance runner now. I do half marathons and marathons, and I qualified for the Boston Marathon earlier this year," she says. "Starting out running marathons and not being able to break four hours, and now qualifying for Boston, I learned the mindset and process of how to do that from the spelling bee.”

Of the many perks that came with winning the bee, 16-year-old Dev Shah, the victor two years ago, is most proud that he got an op-ed published in The Washington Post about how the bee taught him to take risks and accept the results.

During the 2023 bee, Shah spelled “rommack,” a word with an unknown language of origin that he had never seen before.

“The 40 seconds I spent spelling ‘rommack’ exhibited the traits of a champion rather than a good speller,” Shah says. “That’s what makes the spelling bee very special. It tests way more than just spelling. It tests critical thinking, risk-taking and poise.”

Because he passed those tests, Shah says he’s at peace with being forever recognized as a spelling champion, but adds: “I really hope that it’s not the only thing I’m known as for the rest of my life.”

Ben Nuckols has covered the Scripps National Spelling Bee since 2012. Follow his work here.

FILE - President George Bush meets with winners of the National Spelling Bee at the White House, May 31, 1991, including 13-year-old winner Joanne Lagatta, left, of Clintonville, Wisc., Maria Mathew, 11, of Sterling, Ill., and Todd Wallace, 13, of Blackfoot, Idaho. Boy at left is unidentified. (AP Photo/Barry Thumma, File)

FILE – In this June 3, 1999 file photo Nupur Lala, 14, from Tampa, Fla. reacts upon winning the 72nd annual National Spelling Bee in Washington after correctly spelling "logorrhea." (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds, File)

FILE - Anamika Veeramani, 14, of North Royalton, Ohio, holds her trophy after winning the 2010 National Spelling Bee in Washington, June 4, 2010. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)

FILE - Dev Shah, 14, from Largo, Fla., competes during the Scripps National Spelling Bee finals, June 1, 2023, in Oxon Hill, Md. (AP Photo/Nick Wass, File)

FILE - Katharine "Kerry" Close, 13, poses at home in Spring Lake, N.J., May 24, 2006. (AP Photo/Tim Larsen, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Sluggish December hiring concluded a year of weak employment gains that have frustrated job seekers even though layoffs and unemployment have remained low.

Employers added just 50,000 jobs last month, nearly unchanged from a downwardly revised figure of 56,000 in November, the Labor Department said Friday. The unemployment rate slipped to 4.4%, its first decline since June, from 4.5% in November, a figure also revised lower.

The data suggests that businesses are reluctant to add workers even as economic growth has picked up. Many companies hired aggressively after the pandemic and no longer need to fill more jobs. Others have held back due to widespread uncertainty caused by President Donald Trump’s shifting tariff policies, elevated inflation, and the spread of artificial intelligence, which could alter or even replace some jobs.

Still, economists were encouraged by the drop in the unemployment rate, which had risen in the previous four straight reports. It had also alarmed officials at the Federal Reserve, prompting three cuts to the central bank's key interest rate last year. The decline lowered the odds of another rate reduction in January, economists said.

“The labor market looks to have stabilized, but at a slower pace of employment growth,” Blerina Uruci, chief economist at T. Rowe Price, said. There is no urgency for the Fed to cut rates further, for now."

Some Federal Reserve officials are concerned that inflation remains above their target of 2% annual growth, and hasn't improved since 2024. They support keeping rates where they are to combat inflation. Others, however, are more worried that hiring has nearly ground to a halt and have supported lowering borrowing costs to spur spending and growth.

November's job gain was revised slightly lower, from 64,000 to 56,000, while October's now shows a much steeper drop, with a loss of 173,000 positions, down from previous estimates of a 105,000 decline. The government revises the jobs figures as it receives more survey responses from businesses.

The economy has now lost an average of 22,000 jobs a month in the past three months, the government said. A year ago, in December 2024, it had gained 209,000 a month. Most of those losses reflect the purge of government workers by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency.

Nearly all the jobs added in December were in the health care and restaurant and hotel industries. Health care added 38,500 jobs, while restaurants and hotels gained 47,000. Governments — mostly at the state and local level — added 13,000.

Manufacturing, construction and retail companies all shed jobs. Retailers cut 25,000 positions, a sign that holiday hiring has been weaker than previous years. Manufacturers have shed jobs every month since April, when Trump announced sweeping tariffs intended to boost manufacturing.

Wall Street and Washington are looking closely at Friday's report as it's the first clean reading on the labor market in three months. The government didn’t issue a report in October because of the six-week government shutdown, and November’s data was distorted by the closure, which lasted until Nov. 12.

The hiring slowdown reflects more than just a reluctance by companies to add jobs. With an aging population and a sharp drop in immigration, the economy doesn't need to create as many jobs as it has in the past to keep the unemployment rate steady. As a result, a gain of 50,000 jobs is not as clear a sign of weakness as it would have been in previous years.

And layoffs are still low, a sign firms aren't rapidly cutting jobs, as typically happens in a recession. The “low-hire, low-fire” job market does mean current workers have some job security, though those without jobs can have a tougher time.

Ernesto Castro, 44, has applied for hundreds of jobs since leaving his last in May. Yet the Los Angeles resident has gotten just three initial interviews, and only one follow-up, after which he heard nothing.

With nearly a decade of experience providing customer support for software companies, Castro expected to find a new job pretty quickly as he did in 2024.

“I should be in a good position,” Castro said. “It’s been awful.”

He worries that more companies are turning to artificial intelligence to help clients learn to use new software. He hears ads from tech companies that urge companies to slash workers that provide the kind of services he has in his previous jobs. His contacts in the industry say that employees are increasingly reluctant to switch jobs amid all the uncertainty, which leaves fewer open jobs for others.

He is now looking into starting his own software company, and is also exploring project management roles.

December’s report caps a year of sluggish hiring, particularly after April's “liberation day” tariff announcement by Trump. The economy generated an average of 111,000 jobs a month in the first three months of 2025. But that pace dropped to just 11,000 in the three months ended in August, before rebounding slightly to 22,000 in November.

Last year, the economy gained just 584,000 jobs, sharply lower than that more than 2 million added in 2024. It's the smallest annual gain since the COVID-19 pandemic decimated the job market in 2020.

Subdued hiring underscores a key conundrum surrounding the economy as it enters 2026: Growth has picked up to healthy levels, yet hiring has weakened noticeably and the unemployment rate has increased in the last four jobs reports.

Most economists expect hiring will accelerate this year as growth remains solid, and Trump's tax cut legislation is expected to produce large tax refunds this spring. Yet economists acknowledge there are other possibilities: Weak job gains could drag down future growth. Or the economy could keep expanding at a healthy clip, while automation and the spread of artificial intelligence reduces the need for more jobs.

Productivity, or output per hour worked, a measure of worker efficiency, has improved in the past three years and jumped nearly 5% in the July-September quarter. That means companies can produce more without adding jobs. Over time, it should also boost worker pay.

Even with such sluggish job gains, the economy has continued to expand, with growth reaching a 4.3% annual rate in last year's July-September quarter, the best in two years. Strong consumer spending helped drive the gain. The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta forecasts that growth could slow to a still-solid 2.7% in the final three months of last year.

FILE - A hiring sign is displayed at a grocery store in Northbrook, Ill., Tuesday, Jan. 21, 2025. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh)