photos courtesy: Jeopardy!
LEWISBURG – A Bucknell University professor is now one of a few lucky people who can say she was on ‘Jeopardy!’
Jennifer Kosmin, a European History and History of Medicine Professor, made her ‘Jeopardy!’ appearance Thursday night, finishing in third place, “It was incredibly exciting. My family’s been life-long watchers. It’s really a whole day, where they take you to Sony Pictures Studio and they film four or five shows a day. You’re there, you get to watch other live tapings, you get to chat with folks.”
Kosmin says she’s always done the written tests for fun contestants must do to get on the show. After receiving a certain score, Kosmin finally got the call to an in-person tryouts in Philadelphia and Atlanta three years ago, but never heard back until this past February, and taped the show in March.
She says meeting host, Alex Trebek was a highlight, considering his ongoing battle with stage four pancreatic cancer, “It’s inspiring how hard he’s still working. I think he’s in obviously a lot of pain. But he was friendly, he was taking questions from the audience, he spoke to each one of us in person, and then on top of that with the COVID threat starting, he still came up and took a picture with us.”
During the show, Kosmin shared an unforgettable story of the day she got her job at Bucknell, “I was playing with my dog, we were playing around with a tennis ball. I went down to grab it and she sort of went to grab it too and then as I was coming up, she came up hard and put her head into my nose and broke it. But the funny part of the story is, almost immediately after, the phone rang and one of my colleagues now offered me the job at Bucknell.”
Kosmin competed against Iman Sherving, a Los Angeles filmmaker, and Zach Newkirk, a Virginia Attorney, who won for the third-straight time on the show. Kosin’s teaching position at Bucknell is her first professional job, hired in 2015, after graduating from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2014.
