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Coldwater native Katie Bruns will appear on "Jeopardy!" Monday night.
DAYTON - Coldwater native Katie Bruns fulfilled a lifelong goal when she competed as a contestant this summer on "Jeopardy!", the top-rated quiz show on TV with a weekly audience of more than 20 million viewers.
The episode will air Monday evening in syndication.
Bruns, 34, graduated from Coldwater High School in 2010. She has a bachelor's degree in English from the University of Dayton and a master's degree in library and information science from Kent State University.
She works as a record center technician at the Montgomery County Records Center and Archives, and lives in Dayton.
"I've been a fan forever," she said of the show. "My family always would watch it after dinner. That and 'Wheel of Fortune' was always like a routine, and I specifically remember watching it at my grandparents' house … and sitting on their living room floor watching the big old TV when we would go over there for dinner."
Bruns took the "Jeopardy!" Anytime Test online, was selected to audition in a two-part process conducted via videoconference and ended up making the cut to appear on the show. Her mother, Laura Bruns, a former Mercer County Board of Elections director, on social media said host Ken Jennings told the audience that 70,000 people took the online test for this season, with only 400 making it to the actual show.
Though she was unable to disclose any spoilers about her performance, the categories or the outcome of the episode, Bruns spoke to The Daily Standard about the experience of taking part in Season 43 of the most Emmy-winning game show ever.
"Jeopardy!" is taped at Sony Pictures Studios in Culver City, California.
"It was so cool. The people were amazing. Ken is really nice. All the contestant's producers, everyone behind the scenes, the hair and makeup (people), everyone was so supportive and so excited about everyone being there," Bruns said.
The contestants, Bruns noted, spent hours together in the green room.
"We were all kind of swapping stories and practicing telling our little interesting story that you talk about with Ken, rehearsing how we're going to do that, and it was really fun," Bruns said.
Katie Bruns poses with Ken Jennings, the host of "Jeopardy!"
Bruns said Jennings was easy to engage.
"We didn't have one-on-one time with him other than the little back-and-forth that we do on the stage," she said. "He came out to introduce himself to us just as a group before our rehearsal in the morning, and he just kind of welcomed us and told us he was rooting for all of us, and he was very supportive. And then the next time I saw him was when we were on the stage and he was very easy to talk to.
"He is very good at just making it very conversational, because they want everyone to look good."
In late July, Bruns said she got the call from producers letting her know she was selected to compete in "Jeopardy!" The show was set to be taped on Aug. 26.
Not wanting to overwhelm herself in the month before the show, Bruns opted to take a laid-back approach to preparing for competition.
"I didn't really study. I didn't really feel like there was a very good way of doing that. I started playing like a bunch of trivia games … on my phone and just kind of trying to memorize things," she said. "There's no way for me to bone up on astrophysics in the next month, so I was like, 'Just focus on the stuff that you are confident in.'"
An avid viewer of "Jeopardy!" for most of her life, Bruns said she typically does well in categories pertaining to literature, word meanings and history.
"A dream category would be musicals. I know they had a category on recently where it was musicals by song name, and I just nailed it," she said. "I kind of decided ahead of time that if there was a science category, I was just kind of going to ignore it."
Bruns also binge-watched episodes of "Jeopardy!" in the lead-up to her appearance on the show.
"I watched along with a lot of 'Jeopardy!' episodes, and I tried to test my reaction time with a clicky pen, which I had mixed results," she said. "I would say the answers out loud in the form of a question just in my living room, because I was very worried about that. I was like, 'I'm going to forget the form of a question, and I'm going to suffer for it.' So I was trying to kind of get in that groove of the gameplay rather than the questions and the answers."
Coldwater native Katie Bruns will appear on "Jeopardy!" Monday night.
On the day of the show, Bruns said her filming group first underwent rehearsals, where they got familiar with the buzzer.
"It wasn't that hard to use. The timing was tricky. When they read the question, you can start buzzing in as soon as the last word is done," she said. "But if you do it even like a millisecond earlier, then you get locked out and you can't buzz in, even if you're pressing, for I think a quarter of a second. So it was a little nerve-racking. I was like, 'I can't be jumping on it.' I was glad that I did my practice before."
When filming began, though, Bruns said she was ready to roll.
"I was very excited to be there. I had already decided I wasn't going to try and make it too stressful. I wanted to enjoy it. I wanted to enjoy being there more than being so determined to get every question," she said. "I was like, 'I'm going to have the time of my life up here.'"
Once the categories were revealed, Bruns plotted out her strategy.
"As they're announcing them at the start, I would be like, 'OK, I'm going to really try and get those ones and then if there were some that seemed a little out of my wheelhouse, I'd be like, 'OK, maybe I'll avoid those if it's my turn to call one,'" she said. "I wasn't … hunting for daily doubles … where they just like go around and pick random ones."
Though playing "Jeopardy!" on the actual stage is obviously much different than watching at home, Bruns said she didn't particularly feel pressured by the live audience, which included her family members and friends.
"You don't really see them the way that you're positioned," she said. "It wasn't like you could feel the eyes staring at you or anything."
In the end, Bruns said she was satisfied with her approach, performance and time on Jeopardy.
"It was a blur," she said. "It's just shocking to me that I took the test online in June, and now I'm going to be on TV in September. It just has gone by so fast and it was crazy that it all came together so fast. But the experience of being there and of being on the show, it was everything I dreamed of. It was fantastic."
Her advice to aspiring "Jeopardy!" contestants?
"Take the test. You never know. Just take the test. Don't put it off or think, 'I'm not going to do well,'" she said.
