O’Shea ’16 to make return to ‘Jeopardy!’ on Thursday

Terry O’Shea ’16, winner of the Jeopardy! College Championship in February, will return to “Jeopardy!” in the Tournament of Champions, which airs on ABC this Thursday.

Upon winning first place in the final round of Jeopardy! College Championship in February, O’Shea became the first Ivy League student to have won the College Championship, received a cash prize of $100,000 and received an automatic bid to this year’s Tournament of Champions.

O’Shea is also the associate opinion editor for cartoons for The Daily Princetonian.

O’Shea noted that this Tournament of Champions will also feature Jim Coury, the previous College Championship winner who attends Georgetown University, as well as John Pearson, the winner of the Teachers Tournament.

The Teachers Tournament is a Jeopardy! tournament in which the contestants are all full-time instructors of students in grades K–12.

O’Shea’s other competitors, she said, include the contestant Arthur Chu, who won 13 games in a row this season and was controversial for his style of play, and Julia Collins, who won 20 in a row.

Chu, O’Shea explained, stood out as a divisive character for the Jeopardy! community, with viewers and contestants alike dissenting in their opinions about his persona. O’Shea explained that he seems much more competitive on the show than he does in other situations, adding that many contestants adopt on-camera personae very different from their usual personalities.

O’Shea said she was nervous to face the steep competition of the Tournament of Champions.

“Everyone else who is competing had won four or five games of regular Jeopardy!, not easy college Jeopardy!” O'Shea said. “There are a lot of adults who have personal memories of the ’80s. They’ve had so many years to absorb the information.”

On the other hand, O’Shea also said that there are certain topics she, as a young person, has an advantage in. For example, O’Shea noted that, in one game, older contestants got many questions wrong about Channing Tatum movies, ones that a young person like O’Shea would have been able to answer with ease.

O’Shea says she often uses the wording of a question to guess at answers of which she is not totally sure. Her strategy is to choose the right questions. She added, however, that it is frustrating how which questions one is asked depends on the luck of the draw.

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“My specialties are, I guess, pop culture and literature,” she said. “I love the wordplay questions.”

O’Shea explained that after choosing her question, she hits the buzzer as fast as possible if she knows she has an idea of the answer. She then takes a moment to collect her thoughts and formulate her answer.

“In the Tournament of Champions, the questions were much harder [than in the College Championship], so I played more conservatively,” O’Shea said.

O’Shea said she prepared for the Tournament of Champions much like she did for the College Championship.

“I read the news and Wikipedia,” O'Shea said. “There’s also a website that has all the games and all of the questions that have ever been asked, so I went through hundreds of games like that.”

Noting that the Tournament of Champions was filmed in October, O’Shea said that it is difficult not being able to reveal the results of the show to anyone.

Jeopardy! representatives did not respond for comment.