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| Me on set for Wheel of Fortune College Week 2020 |
This year I had the amazing opportunity to represent the University of Maryland, College Park on Wheel of Fortune College Week 2020.
How it happened
For the past few years, watching The Bachelor or The Bachelorette with my friends every Monday night has been a fun tradition. While waiting for those programs to come on, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune always came on before. After several years of casually watching, I realized that I was actually pretty good at these game shows. For fun, in March 2019, I submitted a home video to Wheel of Fortune's website basically explaining who I am and why I want to be on the show.
A few months passed and I hadn't heard anything from them, which was fine with me. I figured that thousands of people must apply everyday and mine got buried in the bunch. However, a few months later in late May of 2019, I got an email saying I was invited to an in-person audition in Richmond, Virginia taking place a few weeks later. I was so surprised and excited!
At the time, I had just started an internship at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Washington, D.C. When I told my supervisor I wouldn't be able to come in one day due to this audition, everyone in the office was so excited for me! I really wanted to do well to come back and give them good news.
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| The only keepsake I got from my audition (June 2019) |
The Audition
To prepare, I watched a lot of Wheel of Fortune and I found websites that had a lot of tips on how to do well on the show. There were several tricks on how and when to choose certain letters to maximize your chances of winning big.
This summer I was mostly living at my house in College Park, Maryland, so driving to Richmond was less a commute than it would've been driving from my home in Columbia, Maryland. My dad and I woke up really early and drove over an hour to the location where the audition was being held. I signed myself in and went into a room of approximately one hundred people. I was really nervous because I was the only college-aged person in the room. However, I did think that it might increase my chances because I didn't have any other competition in my age range.
I wasn't really sure how the audition was going to work, but it actually was really cool. They did several tests to see how good we would be on the show in consideration to our volume and puzzle solving abilities. I later realized that almost everyone in the room was chosen from in-person auditions at local fairs, so being chosen from an online video made me feel like I was special and had a better shot at being chosen.
I used to be really shy and avoided public speaking, but the semester prior to the audition, I took a communications course where I had to present many speeches. The confidence I gained through that class helped me stay calm and less nervous while shouting out letters. We then had to do a written test, where I was not entirely confident with my results.
After they looked at all the tests and evaluated our personalities/voices, they called back just a small amount of people, including me! I was so excited and shocked. There they got a chance to get a better look at our personalities and hear more about ourselves. They seemed to really like me. They told us that if they wanted us to be on the show, they would contact us within 2 weeks, if not, they were not interested.
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| View from the plane ride from BWI-LAX (Feb. 2020) |
Travelling
Several months had passed and I figured that I was not chosen to be on the show. However, when I was on my way to the airport to go to Paris in January 2020, I got an email inviting me to filming just a few weeks later! I was really surprised since they had not contacted me for many months. I immediately told her yes and called my dad to tell him the great news! Later, I booked my flight to Los Angeles.
The spring semester had just started and I just began working as a Peer Advisor in the Sociology office. I had to tell my boss and my teachers that I would be gone for 2-3 days to go film a show and that I'd miss the second week of school. Luckily at the beginning of the semester, you don't really have a heavy workload yet, so I didn't miss anything. Before we left, I made sure to get my nails done because I figured that there would be some attention towards my hands while spinning the wheel.
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| Me eating a delicious donut at the infamous Randy's Donuts (Feb. 2020) |
My dad and I flew to Los Angeles and struggled to find a rental car. After the whole rental car debacle, we drove around Los Angeles before we could check into the hotel. This was my 3rd time in Los Angeles, but it was my first time eating at Randy's Donuts! I've seen countless movies and TV shows featuring the huge donut in the background and we were so happy to have accidentally stumbled upon it.
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| Me at Venice Beach (Feb. 2020) |
Once we checked into the hotel, we drove around LA some more. We went to Venice Beach and walked around a bit. I also had a little photoshoot because I love showing my travels on Instagram. Then we went to Rodeo Drive which I always see in movies too. Since we were only really there for about 48hrs and had been there before, we weren't really sure what else we should see.
Filming
I had to wake up super early and get ready to film. I went to the lobby to wait for the other contestants and the van that would take myself and all the other college contestants to the studio. Before I arrived in LA, they mailed me a thorough packet of everything that I needed to know before going on the show. Once we got inside, they basically went over everything in the packet, some legal stuff, and did our makeup and hair.
We then all got several chances to practice our game play and how we would present on TV. They also filmed short snippets of us for commercials to play before the actual episode aired. I ended up being the third group to film our episode.
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| My Dad and I on set after filming |
I was very nervous and wasn't confident while playing the game. There were so many things that I had to focus on all at once that while watching on TV you would never even imagine. Additionally, after hitting my head a few months back, I was still struggling with spelling and counting occasionally. That, combined with my bad vision, made it really difficult to play at the level I knew I could.
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| The puzzle I solved: Pledging a sorority |
I ended up only getting one puzzle right and won $2000. I really wish I could've won more, but I was kind of glad it was all over. My game was pretty hard and I think all of us were struggling so I felt pretty good about that.
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| Me after finally solving a puzzle |
Airing
I wasn't allowed to tell anyone about the show or anything until they sent me an email with my headshot and gave me the thumbs up. I was so excited to post on all of my social medias about it and tell my teachers. I was able to get the attention of several different students news outlets so that was really exciting to be interviewed. I even got the attention of the University and they wished me luck on the show. I'm sure thousands of people saw that I was going to be on Wheel of Fortune. I also learned afterwards that I actually have an IMDb page now!
My episode was set to air on March 18th, 2020. I was actually on a Spring Break trip at the time, so it was kind of hard to find a method to watch my own episode. Luckily, my parents recorded it and I was able to watch it later on.
I was really nervous for it to air because I knew I did not do too well. I was afraid that people would make fun of me and think I was stupid. I'm a pretty anxious person so I was really avoiding watching and thinking about my poor performance. Thankfully, so many people were supportive and were just happy to see me on there. I figured at the very least I looked very pretty and my introduction made me seem smart.
Unfortunately, I saw so much negativity on Twitter and a lot of people were saying mean things about me. I felt really bad about it and now I don't really feel comfortable watching the show anymore or even hearing it on in the background.
Overall, it was a really cool experience and I'm glad I at least won some money! I think it's such a cool story to tell and really exciting that only a few people in the world have had that opportunity!