Rachel Cassidy had always wanted to appear on ‘Jeopardy!’ The vice chair of Brown’s Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences began watching the show when she was young and has enjoyed playing trivia ever since, including going out with her friends for regular trivia nights. So when she and several colleagues received emails inviting them to take the at-home test for the show, it was a no brainer.
“I was like, ‘’Jeopardy!’ is my dream!’ so I immediately took the test,” Cassidy recalls. A few months later, she was invited for a tryout: this time with other ‘Jeopardy!’ hopefuls. She remembers being told there were no guarantees. “You’ll hear from us within three years, or never,” she was told. But sure enough, just a month later, the crew reached out with an invitation to appear on the show in early September.
With about a month to prepare, Cassidy says she did the best she could to study. “I tried, but I didn’t set up a podium in my house or anything like that,” she says. “It was a little anxiety provoking, like ‘Am I not doing enough, should I be doing more?’ So my friends would send me pop quiz questions to test me. It was kind of funny.”
Soon Cassidy was booking her flight across the country—but she wouldn’t be going alone. Her husband and entire trivia team took time off to cheer her on at the Alex Trebek stage. “As soon as I found out, I texted them. One was already booking her flight that day,” she says. “They were more excited than me.”
The day of filming Cassidy was a ball of nerves, and it quickly became clear that some contestants were very prepared. “Someone asked if I had read the buzzer strategy book,” she says. “‘The what?” Cassidy remembers asking. “What does it say? Press it fast?” But as soon as Cassidy came out to the set, seeing her husband and friends in the audience eased her anxiety.