Newswise — Well over halfway through the championship of the American Psychiatric Association’s MindGames quiz competition, the three-man team of psychiatry residents from the Creighton University School of Medicine thought zero looked like an enticing number.
The trio — Varun Monga, M.D., Venkata Kolli, M.D. and Rohit Madan, M.D. — found themselves 2,200 points in the red in the Jeopardy!-style competition after a spate of misfires on some of the questions, which ranged from complex diagnostic problems to queries on the history of the field of psychiatry. And, as the first-ever Creighton team to reach the finals of MindGames, there was an unfamiliarity with the pace and style of play as they did battle with seasoned teams from Columbia University and Cornell University, along with the added component of a large crowd taking in the event.
They were, by their own admission, a little psyched out.
“It was very nerve-wracking,” said Kolli, who, with his teammates, will conclude their residencies in June. “We were lagging more than 1,000 points behind in the first round and we kept getting deeper. With 75 percent of the competition over, we were 4,000 points behind. We thought, ‘Well, what do we do?’”
They’d come a long way in MindGames. Last year, they finished 13th in the nation, missing out by just 10 spots on a trip to the finals. This year, their final year of eligibility for the competition, they embarked on a dedicated training regimen with help from medical school faculty members at Creighton, the University of Nebraska Medical Center and fellow psychiatrists at the Veterans Administration Medical Center in Omaha.
In February, the trio had earned their way into the final competition by dint of their performance on a 150-question online exam, facing off with 99 other teams from medical schools across the U.S. and Canada. They had an hour to complete that test and they did it in just 46 minutes.
“I was so proud of us and how hard we’d worked,” Kolli said. “And now, here we were, so far down in the scoring that it looked like we’d never be able to catch up.”
But then, they got a question right. Then another. And another. The crowd started cheering on the upstarts, the underdogs, the new guys on the block.
“They loved us,” Monga said. “We started getting a little more calm, a little more familiar with the process. We slowed down and we really enjoyed it.”
And as the second round came to a close, Monga, Kolli and Madan found themselves not only out of the negative figures, but with 3,000 points — ahead of defending champions Cornell at 1,800, and ranged just behind Columbia’s 4,100 points heading into the finals.
For the final question, the category was “Neuroscience.”
“A pretty broad topic,” Monga said. “It could’ve been anything. So we thought, ‘We’ve had a pretty good run in neuroscience and there’s no trophy for second place. Let’s wager it all. If we don’t get it right, we’ll be at zero and that’s better than less than nothing, which is where we were for almost the entire game.’”
When the last question came up, it took everything in the Creighton team’s power not to go into a celebration dance. They had it nailed. The question was: What is the name of the network of brain regions that are active when the individual is not focused on the outside world and the brain is at wakeful rest?
“We knew right away,” Madan said. “Default mode network. It was a Grand Rounds topic at Creighton our first year as residents. We wrote down our answer and we watched the other two teams searching for it. It was a case of the faculty preparing us so well at Creighton.”
Defending champion Cornell was asked for its answer first. The Big Red had default mode network for a response, wagering 1,201 points to land at 3,001 for a final tally, not enough to catch Kolli, Monga and Madan, who answered next and doubled their score to 6,000 points.
So it all came down to Columbia. If the Lion trio got the right answer and put up 1,901 or more points, they’d be the champions. Columbia, too, responded correctly. But they’d played it safe, putting up not a single point. The Bluejay team raised their arms in triumph.
“We had faith in each other,” Kolli said. “We had faith that our coaches had really helped us get to know all of these topics. We learned a life lesson, too. Our backs were against the wall, but we never lost hope. We climbed back into it, slowly and steadily.”
The trio hopes their experience can serve as a guide to future residents interested in taking up the MindGames competition, something Kolli, Monga and Madan hope will become a Creighton tradition. Kolli, who will remain at Creighton, having secured a faculty appointment, said he’s already been urging junior residents to brush up for the competition.
Monga, who will head to a post as an inpatient psychiatrist with Banner Health in Phoenix, and Madan, who joins the faculty of the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, both said the competition was a highlight of their residency at Creighton and something they hope they can leave as a legacy to future psychiatry residents.
“The way we came back, that’s a great story for everyone here,” Madan said.“To see a program from the Midwest, from Creighton, go to a competition like that and do what we did, everyone can be very proud of it,” Monga said. “I know it’s a memory we’ll carry with us forever.”
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