By the time Amy Schneider started showing up on TV screens to quickly rise through the ranks of Jeopardy! champs, she had already completed filming the hit game show months earlier. So while it seems like these contestants are just magically appearing on Jeopardy! that day, in reality, they’ve already gone through a gauntlet of trying to balance their work schedules and personal lives with the demands of flying to Los Angeles to film new episodes.
In a new feature on the secret life of a Jeopardy! champ, Schneider opens up about how she had to make significant changes at her job to accommodate her then-secret success on the show. For starters, she had to step down from being an engineering manager, which is how she’s introduced on the show, and take a position with less direct reports so she didn’t let down her work team. Via The Ringer:
Schneider got into a routine of flying to L.A. on Sunday nights, then heading back home on Tuesday nights, then trying to cram a full week’s worth of work into the next three days. “It’s funny because my boss and the vice president, who are the two people who really knew that I was missing so much time—neither of them really watches Jeopardy! and had no real conception of what it meant that I had to keep going down,” she says. “I had to let them know that in a shocking development in the modern world, I was actually not going to have access to my phone for the taping days.”
Of course, now that Schneider has been racking up huge money on Jeopardy! she’s contemplating what to do next after she finally gets that big check.
“Like so many people during COVID, I had started thinking about—is this what I want to be doing with my life?” Schneider told The Ringer about her day job. “I’d felt like, well, it sounds nice, but I really like the financial security. But now that I’ve got that anyway, I’m really thinking about it.”
(Via The Ringer)
