I plan to try out for Jeopardy! in June when it comes to New York. I won’t turn 18 until May (which will be before June, of course), but I’m 17 now, so I put that on the online thingy. Hopefully, Sony will realize I will be 18 in June and call me.
Best of luck to the rest of you. Remember that until last week, a Doper held the one-day record on the show.
[hijack] Hello maskedman and Frankd6. I’m from the Louisville area as well. Do Louisville area dopers ever get together?[/hijack]
I’m whiterabbit’s mom, and I was on Jeopardy in '94 – lost to the all-time highest female money winner on the show up to that point on her day 5, which was seriously intimidating. But I won a trip to Ireland, which was pretty darned consoling!
But anyway, they’re always looking for people with good personalities for TV – lots of geeks can pass the test who have zip personality. And in my case, I think it helped that at the time I was testing, (a) I was female (in those days the female-to-male ratio auditioning was MUCH lower, about 1:10), and (b) I lived in LA at the time so I could be called kind of last minute to be on the show. I got the call less than a month before tape date.
As my daughter said, I practiced clicking in – that’s probably the hardest part – and I have to admit that when I clicked in successfully on first question and Alex turned to me, I have never in my LIFE had such a blank mind :eek: – but I also, once I got the call for taping, did some quickie cramming on U.S. presidents, opera, English royalty, and world capitols as well as U.S. and Australian state capitols. I had my kids drill me on the capitols. And if you stop to think about it, the level of difficulty on most questions is NOT that deep – surface knowledge suffices in most areas. When they ask questions in a subject you’re familiar with, they seem to be incredibly easy, so that’s a good clue as to the true difficulty factor.
I have to say, though, that all else aside, it was probably about the most fun half-hour of my life with my clothes on!
The woman who beat me so soundly came back for the Tournament of Champions the following year, and we got together for a long lunch and visit. Contestants are normally very supportive of each other – we’re ALL good or we wouldn’t be there! – and it was fun to go cheer her on. Alas, she lost in the first round. 
I missed this thread when it was around originally.
I took the test in Atlanta about 3 years ago. I thought I did fairly well during the 50 videotaped Alex questions, but I did not make the cut. Similar to other stories, my group went from 75 people to 6.
And the questions were harder than most of what they ask on TV. Oh well, I’ve still got the 40¢ JEOPARDY [sup]TM[/sup] pen that they gave to all the losers on the way out. 
Best of luck. I did all of this in 1999-2000. I can now tell people that Merv Griffin paid for my honeymoon.
Practice buzzing in - this is what really messed me up.