Council, County Honors Spelling Bee Champ Snigdha Nandipati

The 14-year-old Francis Parker School student who won the Scripps National Spelling Bee was honored Tuesday by the San Diego City Council and San Diego County Board of Supervisors.

The City Council proclaimed it "Snigdha Nandipati Day" in the city of San Diego to honor her victory.

The teen, who just completed eighth grade at the Linda Vista campus, was presented with a proclamation applauding her "outstanding achievement" by Councilwomen Sherri Lightner and Lorie Zapf.

The Rancho Penasquitos girl, who was accompanied by her parents and her grandparents—visiting from India—lives in Lightner's district and attends school in Zapf's district.

Snigdha outlasted her competitors over 13 rounds of competition in National Harbor, Md., last month and emerged the winner when she spelled "guetapens" correctly. The French-derived word means an ambush, snare or trap.

The teen returned home to final examinations that finished the school year and, while planning to relax over the summer, has big plans for her future.

"Well, I want to go into medicine, probably psychiatry and maybe neuroscience," Snigdha told the council. "I would like to go to Harvard but, yeah, we'll see how that turns out."

She also said appearing on "The Jimmy Kimmel Show" was "really fun."

A jesting Councilman Carl DeMaio challenged her to spell "amortization," which he said was an important word in his pension reform efforts. After he gave her a definition, she spelled it correctly.

At the Board of Supervisors meeting, one member noted that honoring Snigdha was more about her pursuit of excellence than her spelling.

"That's what we see with Snigda—whatever she chooses to go into we know she's going to rise to the top, because she chooses that path," Supervisor Pam Slater-Price said.

Snigdha is the second Southern Californian to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee, which began in 1925, following Anurag Kashyap of Poway, the 2005 champion.

Snigdha won $30,000 from Scripps, which owns television stations and newspapers; a $5,000 scholarship from the Sigma Phi Epsilon Educational Foundation; $2,600 in reference works from Encyclopaedia Britannica, including its final print edition, and a lifetime membership to Britannica Online Premium; a $2,500 U.S. savings bond; a complete reference library from the dictionary publisher Merriam-Webster; and a Nook Color and online language course from Middlebury Interactive Languages.

-City News Service