Left, middle: Sophomore Amanda Nowotny, the Pitt student selected to compete in the 2004 Jeopardy! College Championship, tapes a TV promo with host Alex Trebek during the Oct. 8 taping at the Petersen Events Center. Top right: longtime Jeopardy! aficionado Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg signs in during a visit to the set. Bottom: Trebek shows his good taste in reading material.

“It’s all kind of surreal,” said a smiling, somewhat dazed Amanda Nowotny, 19, as she stepped off the glitzy TV game-show set erected in Pitt’s Petersen Events Center, and prepared to meet news media.

A sophomore in the School of Arts and Sciences, Nowotny was the Pitt student selected to compete against 14 other students from around the country in the 2004 “Jeopardy!” College Championship, filmed at the Petersen on Oct. 8 and 9. Her comment about the surreal could have referred to the set itself—a mini-theme park of University of Pittsburgh iconography (including a statue of a prowling Pitt Panther and a Commons Room-inspired backdrop). Or Nowotny may have been describing the hurricane of activity around her.

Wardrobe and make-up people, the show’s director, producers, and dozens of “Jeopardy!” staff bustled around the set, assisting the news media and checking on last-minute details. TV crews from as far away as Buffalo, N.Y., and Lexington, Ken., taped stand-up reports and interviewed student contestants from their respective cities. Students were competing for the top $100,000 cash prize, a $50,000 second-place prize, and a third-place prize of $25,000. Each participant is guaranteed a minimum of $5,000.

“I played some practice games to prepare for this,” said Nowotny during the 8:15 a.m. Oct. 8 media availability. The New Castle-area native said the previous 24 hours had been “crazy” and that she felt “too tired to be nervous.” Tired or not, she deftly fielded such questions from Pittsburgh reporters as, “How long did you wait to audition?” (The line was pretty short, Nowotny said) and “Do you like Alex Trebek with or without his mustache?” (With).

Setting aside her facial-hair preferences, Nowotny stood next to the clean-shaven Trebek to shoot 15-second promos for the “Jeopardy!” College Championship, which will air during November’s TV sweeps. Each student took his or her turn doing promos, then posed for group shots.

Once the rehearsal began, Nowotny came alive with determination and was quick with her buzzer, providing the correct question for each answer time after time. The other local competitors during the weekend tapings were Kermin Fleming of Carnegie Mellon University and Rachel McCool, a Pittsburgh native who attends Dickinson College.

Trebek said the university-based shows can be more exciting than standard “Jeopardy!” “You have intercollege rivalries that may apply, and there is always a lot of support in the audience at university shoots,” he said, adding that the answers for these segments are geared toward a college curriculum.

Jeopardy! shot 10 episodes in all, to air Nov. 10 through 23 on WPXI/Channel 11.