A State College resident and Penn State professor will be a contestant this week on ‘Jeopardy!’
Ariana Mikulski, an associate teaching professor of Spanish, will appear on Tuesday’s episode of ‘America’s favorite quiz show,’ which airs locally at 7 p.m. on ABC 23-WATM.
She took an online test for the show several years ago and was invited to an audition in Pittsburgh last August. Mikulski got the call in January to be a contestant and the episode airing Tuesday was recorded on Feb. 11 at Sony Studios in Culver City, Calif.
“I grew up watching the show, and I’m a trivia fan, so I was thrilled to be a contestant,” Mikulski said in a news release.
Contestants cannot reveal how they fared until after the episode airs, but Mikulski said it was a fun experience to see the show from a behind-the-scenes perspective and to see host Alex Trebek at work.
‘The experience of taping was surreal, fun and fascinating,” Mikulski said. “Everything happened so fast that it seemed like a blur. It was interesting to see all of the behind-the-scenes aspects of the show, like the podiums that make the contestants the same height or seeing Alex [Trebek] re-record the audio of a clue because he stumbles over a word.”
Mikulski has a Ph.D. in second language acquisition from the University of Iowa. She has been a member of the Penn State faculty since 2012.
State College area residents have turned up on ‘Jeopardy!’ on a fairly regular basis, most recently in 2018 when Rebecca Zoshak, a Penn State language specialist, was a contestant. Zoshak was a one-day champion, winning $14,407. State College Area High School graduate Aaron Lichtig, who now resides in Maryland, was a contestant and one-day champion on the show in January.
