The categories are familiar to the millions of Wheel of Fortune fans: What Are You Doing?, Before and After, and Song/Artist. Solving three examples of these puzzles (answers: Looking Through Binoculars, All-Star Cast Iron Skillet, I Get Around by the Beach Boys) netted Baruch undergraduate Krystiana Pironti $37,776. Pironti (’14) was the winning contestant on the Jun. 24, 2013, broadcast of the iconic game show.
The Zicklin marketing major has been a fan of the top-rated syndicated TV program since she was a young child, learning her alphabet while watching Wheel with her grandmother.
So what—apart from winning—was the best part of appearing on the show? “Everything,” gushes the Queens native, who admittedly “loves reliving the experience.” Most surprising to her was how hard it was to spin the famous wheel. “They allowed all the contestants to practice spinning it [before taping]. The actual wheel is incredibly heavy; it took a few tries for me to get the hang of it.”
With her winnings, Pironti plans to pay off student loans and grow her bank account. But a girl has to have some fun: “I’m not going to lie. I’m probably going to take a nice shopping trip,” she says.
—Diane Harrigan