Yale student on his ‘Jeopardy!’ run: ‘It’s nerve-wracking’
Matt Amodio, a graduate student in computer science at Yale University, competed on the quiz show “Jeopardy!” on Wednesday night. Contestants are sworn to secrecy about how they did on the show. Wednesday’s show was filmed in April, and Amodio has been keeping the results to himself until now.
Amodio won the match, which means he will also appear on the show Thursday and perhaps beyond that.
“Jeopardy!” airs locally at 7 p.m. weekdays on WTNH. It is the top-rated quiz show on television, known for its distinctive practice of stating answers on a range of topics and making the contestants respond in the form of a question.
A native of Ohio who’s been at Yale since 2017, Amodio was reached Wednesday afternoon by phone in Cleveland, where he was preparing to watch his “Jeopardy!” debut with his family. He described the experience as “overwhelming. As I said on the show, I study artificial intelligence, but unfortunately there I had to demonstrate real intelligence.”
Amodio, 30, is in the fifth year of his doctoral studies at Yale. He wants to become a college professor and would love to stay in New Haven if possible, though potential job offers may take him anywhere.
“Jeopardy!” first aired in 1964. Its bestknown host, Alex Trebeck, was with the show from 1984 until his death in November. The current season is featuring guest hosts until a new permanent host is chosen. This week’s “Jeopardy!” host is “Good Morning America” anchor Robin Roberts.
Amodio says Roberts was “so nice. It was her first time there, too, and she must have been as overwhelmed as I was, but she couldn’t have been nicer.”
“I’ve been watching ‘Jeopardy!’ for as long as I can remember,” Amodio says. It was his parents who encouraged him to take the online test to become a contestant. From that, he was invited to do a live audition. “I drove to Boston for it, and I met someone there who also goes to Yale, and we’ve become friends. He hasn’t been invited on the show yet.”
“They give you a little bit of notice. Then it’s a whirlwind. I’d never been on TV before, but there’s this whole crew whose job it is to make you comfortable.”
Amodio didn’t do much special preparation for being a contestant. “I do bar trivia with my friends. I watch the show. It’s like a hobby. You just learn things. I don’t know how people used to do it, but now, with Wikipedia, I know how to obtain knowledge. One piece of information just leads you to another.”
Some areas, however, don’t come naturally to him. “I definitely have an Achilles’ heel. It’s pop culture. I have a historian’s mindset. I like the pop culture of 30, 40 years ago — once it becomes history. So I had to look up what a lot of recent movies were, and music. I looked at TMZ for the first time.”
Calling himself “a bit of a perfectionist,” Amodio says, “I get very angry at myself anytime I miss a question. I’m also a riskaverse person in general, and on the show you have to risk a fair bit of money. It’s nerve-wracking.”
His first night of the culminating “Final Jeopardy” round was particularly harrowing, he says. “They give you the category, then the question, and you have a finite time in which to wager. I remember seeing that category and racking my brains for anything I knew about it. But I ended up getting it right.”