Semi-retired Oklahoma State University accounting professor Maryanne Mowen will appear as a contestant on "Jeopardy!" set to air on April 8, 2019, Las Cruces Sun-News reports.
The opportunity came last January when Mowen took the long-running game show's initial 15-minute online test with 85,000 other hopefuls. After waiting for months, she received an audition invitation in Los Angeles — one of only 3,000 people called in. Not 24 hours after returning home to Sante Fe, New Mexico, following the audition, Mowen received the call from the program's casting director to compete on the show in three weeks' time.
"It was amazing," Mowen told
Mowen, 70, previously served as an associate professor of accounting at Oklahoma State University and its Spears School of Business for 33 years before moving to Santa Fe in 2011 with her husband, another Spears professor. Mowen still teaches online accounting courses for the university.
A native of Denver, Mowen previously studied history at Colorado College in the 1960s before earning her doctorate in economics at Arizona State University.
"Just having a broad knowledge base is helpful [for the show] because that gives you something to build on," she added. "A lot of it is just current events knowledge. ... Every time they have a category like the 1960s, I am thinking, 'Well, I lived through them, surely I can pull myself out for this.'"
While Mowen can't reveal the outcome of the yet-to-be aired episode, she commented that she competed against two men — a professional sports gambler and a blogger.
