This year’s Scripps National Spelling Bee co-champions Vanya Shivashankar, 13, and Gokul Venkatachalam, 14, would like to let you in on a little secret: they are both very, very smart, and that is very, very cool.
“If we weren’t smart, we wouldn’t have won the Scripps National Spelling Bee, and gotten big trophies,” Venkatachalam says, in a PSA for Mashable. “Trophies are cool,” Shivashankar adds. “Everyone knows that.”
So, the champs say, anytime anyone tries to tell you that it’s not cool to be smart, remind those people of Vanya and Gokul, and how they got to be on ESPN. ESPN! So, make sure to study and practice and learn as much as you can so you too can one day be that cool.
Read next: Can You Guess the Meaning of These Scripps National Spelling Bee Words?
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