Spoiler Alert: On March 8, UD's Conor Murphy came from third place at the end of Double Jeopardy to win the game in Final Jeopardy. He will return to play on March 11.

University of Delaware graduate student Conor Murphy said he has always had a love of learning and the ability to retain information, characteristics that have served him well in school.

As it turns out, they’ve also now earned him a spot on TV’s “Jeopardy!” where he will compete on Friday, March 8.

Murphy, of Thorofare, New Jersey, grew up watching the popular trivia game show, where contestants are given an answer and must then sound their buzzer and pose the corresponding question. He said he always believed he had the right skills to move beyond local trivia contests and compete on the national stage.

“As the world’s foremost trivia game show, ‘Jeopardy!’ offered me the chance both to compete against the best players and to have the opportunity to take home more than a $30 gift card for my efforts,” he said.

Murphy tried out for the college version of the show in 2015, making it as far as an in-person interview but not ultimately selected as a contestant.

More recently, he gave the standard version of the show a shot by joining some 80,000 other hopefuls in taking an online test the show makes available once a year. Murphy was one of about 3,000 successful test-takers to get an interview — as he had in 2015.

“But only this year was I one of the 400 people who got phone calls informing them they had advanced to the big show,” he said.

He wasn’t free to talk about the specifics of the show, including his final score or whether he returned as champion for subsequent episodes, but competing on air “was a great experience,” he said. His participation was taped during UD’s winter break.

Murphy praised the show’s contestant coordinators as “really upbeat” as they encourage players and help calm their nerves before the game begins. Host Alex Trebek, he said, is a perfectionist in his delivery of the clues and enjoys interacting with the studio audience during breaks.

And the hardest part of competing? “The buzzer timing is incredibly difficult and can take you the whole show to find your rhythm,” he said. “It really makes or breaks your game.”

At UD, Murphy is a first-year graduate student who is pursuing a master’s degree in history in the Hagley Program in the History of Capitalism, Technology and Culture. He is interested primarily in the cultural history of the United States between the Civil War and World War II, especially at the intersections of the environment, technology and entertainment.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in history and political science from the University of Notre Dame in 2017.

“Jeopardy!” airs at 7 p.m. on WPVI-TV (ABC Channel 6) in northern Delaware and the Philadelphia area and at 7:30 p.m. on WBOC-TV (Fox 21 Delmarva) in southern Delaware.