The notorious six-by-five blue board stares down waves of contestants day after day when ‘Jeopardy!’ is recording their seasons. Each shoot day consists of one week’s worth of televised content. For some contestants, their experience can be quite short.

“You show up early, you go through a briefing, you sign some papers,” said Donovan Bisbee ’12, a challenger for the sixth episode of season 43. “You get to do a practice round to try to get used to the buzzer. Then, some people who did that, played in the first game, and then 45 minutes later left and went to the airport.”

Bisbee was grateful to experience multiple days of filming, as he served as the standby alternate because he was an out-of-state contestant. Unfortunately, Bisbee’s 45 minutes in front of the camera similarly came and went like so many contestants before him. However, this did not come without some great success.

Bisbee was well on his way to a near wire-to-wire victory leading up to Final Jeopardy. He pulled ahead with an 11th clue and never looked back. Bisbee amassed a lead as large as $8,600, but lost the game in Final Jeopardy. Bisbee was able to find some big success on the board because of some direct ties back to his time at Wabash.

“Props to the late, great Tom Campbell, an absolutely incredible former professor,” said Bisbee. “I took four classes from him. That’s how I knew Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was $2,000. Precogs, which was a Daily Double, that I was like, no way, no way would have known that. But I took a sci-fi lit class with Tom Campbell, and that spawned a love for Phillip K. Dick.”

In addition to his success on the board, Bisbee drew comparisons between his experience in filming and his time at Wabash. Bisbee is a brother of Kappa Sigma, as well as being a member of Glee Club and being involved in theater productions. Like the brevity of his recording experience, Bisbee’s time at Wabash benefitted from this flash-in-the-pan experience.

“It’s so much like Wabash in these little fishbowl intensity experiences,” said Bisbee. “It was only a day, but because of the intensity of the time spent together the relationships that get formed are so intense. Additionally you’re all there for a reason. You’re all the same kind of weird, in the same way that no one ends up at Wabash by accident, unless you’re me.”

Bisbee, who hails from Ridgefield, Washington, heard about Wabash because his sister read some of the college’s information in the book Colleges That Change Lives. Since she was the oldest sibling, both Bisbee sons were inundated with college mailers from an early age. Ridgefield High School produced 3 Wabash men, as the brothers got a friend to tag along.

“As an avid ‘Jeopardy!’ fan, it was cool to see a Wabash alumnus participate in one of my favorite shows,” said Paul Hawksworth ’28. “Over the years, the show has only increased in difficulty, and, despite the end result, Bisbee’s performance was a great representation of the quality of Wabash men.”

Bisbee went on to obtain his M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He now serves as a Lecturer and Director of Oral Communication Courses in the Department of Communication Studies at Baruch College, City University of New York.