Over the upcoming Memorial Day weekend, T.L.Weston eighth grader, Baruni Jakkula will represent the state of Mississippi in the Scripps Spelling Bee in Washington DC. She finished as the overall state runner-up and through a new provision in the contest rules, she will be allowed to compete in the nation’s foremost demonstration of word knowledge among school aged children. Whether she finished first or second in the entire state are accomplishments in and of themselves. What’s most impressive is her sparse amount of time, being really familiar and immersed in the English language. “She came to the States in 2019,” said Jakkula’s mother, Vani Rao. “We don’t speak much English at home. And our first language is Telugu and we also speak Kannada.”
With less than four years worth of immersion in English, Baruni knows more words in the language than most who have spent decades speaking it. So, how did she become proficient enough to represent the state on such an elite stage? “I have an app on my phone called Word Club,” Jakkula explained. “It connects you to something called words of champions and it quizzes you on vocabulary, stems and origins of words.”
And she gets plenty of practice. Her little brother, Chaitanya and mother quiz her multiple times a day on words, stems and meanings. These mental exercises plus Jakkula’s growing experience in spelling bees gives her a great shot at doing well in May and a good strategy for navigating the anxiety of competition. “I finished as the runner up when I was in fifth grade and it just motivated me to keep trying,” Jakkula explained. “I get nervous sometimes especially in the early rounds, but I just think about the meaning of the word, write the word out in my hand, think of the stem and concentrate only on the words and not the people in the room.”
Roa explained that her daughter has been the Greenville Public School District’s champion for her sixth, seventh and eighth grade years and finished in fourth place statewide last year.
Jakkula knows that many of the words that she learns from the eighth grade list are not terms that she uses frequently in speaking with her peers. “Sometimes in essays, perhaps,” Rao said with a slight chuckle. But these terms that seem out of the ordinary for everyday parlance are being placed on reserve for a specific time well beyond the spelling bee. “I really like learning words from the medical profession,” Jakkula said. “I want to become a cardiologist.”
She is also not the only family member gaining notoriety. Her little brother was recognized in a national art contest, Doodle for Google in 2021. “There is pressure on me to do well, but not because of my brother,” Jakkula said. “I like to follow my own path.”
“Also, it feels good to represent my city and my school district and it always encourages me when my friends, family and classmates at school tell me, ‘congratulations.’”
