1992 winner Amanda Goad went to Harvard Law School and became a staff lawyer on the ACLU's LGBT and HIV rights project.
1981 winner Paige Pipkin Kimble, right, was runner-up in 1980 to Jacques Bailly, left. She couldn't shake the spelling bee; she serves as its executive director.
Source: Slate
Bailly, the 1980 winner, is an associate professor of classics at the University of Vermont and the bee's official pronouncer.
Source: Time
1983 winner Blake Giddens has served for years as a national spelling bee judge. Giddens won with the word "purim" and as a civil engineer in Virginia.
Source: The Washington Post
Pratyush Buddiga, the 2002 winner, is a fixture on the professional poker circuit.
Source: The Washington Post
Rebecca Sealfon, the 1997 winner, remembered for screaming each letter of her last word — "euonym" — went on to found Research Match, a startup that helps professors and students collaborate. She's currently a software engineer at Qualia Media.
Source: LinkedIn
If you've ever played Big Game Hunter 2012, you can hear freelance voice-actor and 1984 winner Dan Greenblatt say "Top of the food chain, baby!"
Source: Slate
1973 winner Barrie Trinkle went to MIT, spent more than a decade at NASA's Jet Propulsion lab, worked as an editor at Amazon, and now is a freelance editor.
Source: USA Today
Jonathan Knisely won in 1971 with the word "shaloon" and is now a doctor of internal medicine at North Shore LIJ hospital in New York.
Source: North Shore LIJ, Scripps
1969 winner Susan Yoachum was a journalist and part of a San Jose Mercury News team that won a Pulitzer in 1989. She later became political editor of The San Francisco Chronicle.
Source: SFGate
1988 champion Raga Ramachandran started Stanford at 16 and is now a professor of pathology and UCSF's medical school.
1991 winner Amy Marie Dimak was a molecular biotechnology researcher before having three kids and then becoming a nurse.
George Thampy, the 2000 winner, graduated from Harvard in 2010 and worked in private equity before moving to pharmaceuticals.
Source: LinkedIn
2007 winner Evan O'Dorney is a fellow Harvard alum who graduated in 2015. In the fall, he'll head overseas to the University of Cambridge to study mathematics as a Churchill Scholar. He then plans to attend Princeton University and pursue a career in academia.
Source: Harvard
2006 champion Katharine Close won with the word "ursprache." She graduated from Cornell University in 2014 and is working towards a journalism masters degree in business and economic reporting at New York University.
Source: Business Insider
2008 winner Sameer Mishra ran the spelling bee's social media last year, live-tweeting every word in the competition. This year, he's an investment banking summer analyst at Morgan Stanley. He will return to Columbia University in the fall for his senior year.
Source: LinkedIn
1998 winner Nupur Lala was a star of the 2002 documentary "Spellbound," went on to medical school.
Source: Reuters