Barack Obama is president! Have you gotten your magical unicorn that’s going to make everything all better? Not yet? Me neither, but I’m gonna name mine Davey.

In the meantime, your best chance to improve your financial situation might come next Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, when “Jeopardy!,” the quiz show that makes unnecessary punctuation fun!, conducts online contestant tryouts.

Most people don’t know how people are selected to appear on the show, but as someone who has failed to get on “Jeopardy!” numerous times, I can give you a sense of how it doesn’t work: It doesn’t work by going to Alex Trebek’s house at three in the morning dressed as the killer from the “Saw” movies and reciting facts you learned from Stephen King novels.

Actually I have never gone to Alex Trebek’s house dressed as the killer from “Saw.” (I was the killer from “Scream.”) But my point is, I have long wanted to be on the show, to the point that I even subjected myself to years of high school and college quiz bowl teams, wherein roving bands of nerds travel the country to see who can be the first to correctly identify Levi P. Morton as Benjamin Harrison’s Vice President. It’s intense.

So every year, beginning about ten years ago, I registered on the “Jeopardy!” web site to try to get on the show. The online tryout only began a few years ago, and before that, you had to get your name randomly selected for an invitation to audition in person. The ones I went to were usually held at Navy Pier in Chicago, which probably weeded out a lot of the smartest potential contestants, because smart people don’t pay $3,000 for two hours of parking.

What you’d do was, you’d go to this conference room, and you’d take a 50-question test requiring really tough “Jeopardy!”-level knowledge. Usually about 10 percent would pass, and those people got to stay to play a mock version of the game while contestant coordinators wrote secret little comments to each other, probably important show-related analysis like “Number 14 has booger hanging from nose,” “Number 9 looks like a wiener” and “Do you like me? Yes/no.”

If you weren’t selected, you had to resubmit your name the next year; some contestants tried out a dozen or more times before getting on the program, but this is not recommended, because you would have to win 200 straight games just to make up your Navy Pier parking expenses.

These days the process works pretty much the same way, but the first step, the contestant exam, is handled online. Applicants get 15 seconds for each question, which is barely enough time to look up answers on Wikipedia. Not that scamming “Jeopardy!” will get you anywhere; the people who pass the test and are invited to try out in person have to take another 50-question test to demonstrate they weren’t cheating on the online one.

But if you pass the tests, and don’t come across as too much of a derelict in the mock-game portion, you could wind up on the show! Then a 30-year-old computer programmer will promptly wipe the floor with your gray matter. At least that’s what happened to the 148 players who lost to human buzzsaw Ken Jennings in 2004, until he was called back to his home planet.

Jennings racked up 74 victories, setting a “Jeopardy!” record and earning over $3 million before the carnage was over. A lot of fans of the show were upset because his streak kept other very smart people from winning even a single game. But I’m glad he won all that money. He seems like a really nice guy, you know? Like the kind of person who’d be willing to invest $75,000 in an exciting investment opportunity I’d like to talk with him about. Or at least half that amount, so I can park my car at Navy Pier.

So go to Jeopardy.com right now and sign up for the test – you have to register ahead of time – and get ready for a brain-busting challenge. And in case you don’t wind up getting on the show, maybe your unicorn can cheer you up.

Scott is a third-year law student. He was Benjamin Harrison’s Secretary of State.