The Price Was Right

This past summer, a group of 17 grad students and two faculty members took a trip to L.A. to attend The Price Is Right

By Jennifer Palmberg
The Collegian

Nicole Duncan, a graduate student at Fresno State, won a red Ford Focus this summer on the game show The Price is Right.

Duncan had gone to the show with a group of 16 other grad students and two faculty members. The group consisted of members from the National Student Speech and Language Hearing Association. The group just graduated and wanted to do something fun for the week they had off before their summer clinic started.

Duncan’s friend, Natalie Richardson, organized the trip to The Price is Right. Richardson rented a Limbosuine, a bus designed like a limousine on the inside, and the group took off for L.A. at 4 a.m.
After interviews with the show’s executives, the group was admitted into the studio audience.

“During the show they called my name so I went up to the contestants’ row,” Duncan said. “The first game we played, we had to have the closest guess to the price of a six-foot, stainless steel, outdoor heater. I guessed $750 and the actual price was $799 and I won. So then I had to play a game called Pick the Price.”

Pick the Price is a game where the contestant is presented with a possible gift and is given five chances to pick the correct price of the item out of a given set of number possibilities.

In Duncan’s case, the gift was the car and she was given a five-digit price possibility with the middle number seven already presented to her ($_ _, 7 _ _). She was also given 20 two-digit number choices to fill the blanks on either side of the seven.

“My first guess was 17,” Duncan said . “They told me that I had picked the correct number for the first half of the price. The next number I picked was 27 and they told me that was the correct number for the second half of the price. So the total price came out to be $17,727. I had won the car in two guesses. I was so excited that I went ballistic.”

Although Duncan already sold the car, she said she was glad to have a chance to be on the show.