Game Show Mania, Part 1

Game Show Mania, Part 2

MILLIONAIRE WANNABE: Sefcik and his game-show winnings.

Jim Sefcik ’91 has had his 15 minutes of fame—and has come away a bit richer for the experience.

It was more than a year earlier, when Sefcik was unemployed, “with a lot of time on my hands,” he says, that he went to a casting call near his home in Washington, D.C., for the syndicated version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire with Meredith Viera. He did it on a whim, thinking,

“I’ll have a good story to tell no matter what happens.”

One written, timed exam; an application; and a screen test and on-camera interview later, he found himself on the list of contestants. The producers told him he could be called at any time, and he had 24 hours to respond, he says, yet they ended up calling while he was away on vacation.

“I pleaded with them,” Sefcik says, but they stuck to their rules. “Then they ended up calling me again later, so it all worked out.”

How did he do? Pretty well for such a high-pressure situation: He answered 10 questions right, taking home $32,000. Now gainfully employed in the insurance field, Sefcik says he’ll use the money to buy a sailboat.

While he calls the day “a total whirlwind experience” that left him fuzzy on the details, including what those first 10 questions were, he says he will always remember the one he got wrong: “What newspaper published the famous editorial in 1897 that included the line, ‘Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus?’” After narrowing his options down to the Chicago Tribune and The New York Sun, he chose the Tribune. But the editorial was published in the New York newspaper.

He also was disappointed that he didn’t get to use information from his two Rochester majors, economics and political science. “I didn’t get any questions about presidents,” he laments.

His show aired December 20, 2002, and since then he’s gotten a lot of . . . well, feedback. “I chose two Rochester classmates—Andy Bosco and Dino LaFiandra, both ’91—to be part of the five people I could call as ‘lifelines,’ though I didn’t end up calling either one of them. But now all my friends want to know how come I didn’t use them as lifelines.”

Sefcik learned the hard lesson of fame as well. Although he created quite a stir with the producers by answering so many questions correctly while using so few lifelines, “As soon as the show ended, I was old news. I was out the side door and on the shuttle back to the hotel. My 15 minutes were up. Ah, the cruel reality of the world of television!”

Game Show Mania, Part 2

It was not a subject that he wanted, but a subject that he didn’t want, that plagued Tim Mhyre ’00M (PhD) last year, when he became a contestant on Jeopardy!, the famed quiz show led by Alex Trebek.

Mhyre went through many of the same experiences as Sefcik in June 2001—auditioning on a whim, surviving the tests, and waiting to be called—and, once he hit the Jeopardy! stage last September, he was clicking that buzzer with the best of them, as if he were on “autopilot,” he told Rochester Medicine.

He won the first show, but what Mhyre, a genetics researcher, dreaded arrived on the second show: the category Opera. Finishing second on the second day earned him $10,999.

A friend gave him $1 to make it a nice round number.