At 11 a.m. today, Lindsey Mitchell (sophomore-psychology) will be able to watch herself on television.

That is, unless she's busy spending time in her...

Brand new camper!

While on spring break in Los Angeles, Mitchell cleaned up on The Price Is Right, winning the showcase and taking home nearly $30,000 in prizes, including baby furniture, a baby grand piano, a global positioning system, a Dell computer and printer, a riding lawn mower and, of course, a camper.

And the funny thing is, going on the show wasn't even her idea.

Mitchell and her roommate, Kristin Williams (sophomore-secondary education), went to California to visit Mitchell's sister. It was Williams, a fan of the show since junior high and a viewer with her father during the summer, who suggested joining the audience.

So the two ordered tickets online and at 6 a.m. went to the Hollywood lot where the show is filmed, only to discover that the line was too long to be in the audience for that day's show.

But Williams was undeterred. The roommates went back at 1 a.m. the next day and slept on the street to finally make it on the show.

"Lindsey did not want to go at all," Williams said. "She was very mad at me for making her sleep on the street. She's not so mad at me anymore."

On the day that Mitchell appeared on the show, the audience was around three-quarters college students, she said.

This is common during spring break, said Price Is Right producer Roger Dobkowitz. The studio audience of 315 is often half to two-thirds spring breakers, he said.

"We get college kids all year long, but just during spring break do we get so many of them," Dobkowitz said, pointing out that the rest of the year, most students come from local colleges.

Before going to Los Angeles, Mitchell and Williams made sure to prepare to advertise their school on television, buying cheap Penn State shirts downtown and writing "Penn State loves Bob" on them with Sharpie markers.

Although once onstage, legendary Price Is Right host Bob Barker did not say anything about the shirt, Mitchell said, because nearly everyone in the audience was wearing something similar for their own schools.

With the large number of people wearing personalized shirts to the taping, one might think that this is a way to get called on down, but Dobkowitz quickly refutes such a notion.

"We don't pay attention to the T-shirts at all," he said. "People like to wear them, and people might think we pick because of the T-shirts, but we don't."

So how does someone get lucky enough to get the chance to get onstage with Mr. Barker?

"Whenever I would watch the show, I thought it was random," Williams said.

But upon looking into it, she realized the nine people given the opportunity to win are not randomly selected at all.

In fact, two Price Is Right staffers interview all 300-plus people in line before the taping begins.

"We try to find out something about them, and then we try to put on the nine most interesting people," Dobkowitz said.

Normally, the people who get on, he said, are in a really good mood, happy, energetic or quirky.

During her interview, Mitchell said she was just asked where she was from and what she did.

"I have no idea [why they picked me]," she said. "The goal was kind of to get my roommate up there. She's the one that wanted to be up there."

Williams was also surprised her roommate was the one chosen.

"She wasn't very excited at all [during the interview]," Williams said, "and I was hopping around all excited."

Nevertheless, when the taping started more than 13 hours after Mitchell and Williams arrived to wait in line, Mitchell was one of the first four people to "come on down!" to Bidder's Row.

"I couldn't believe it," Mitchell said. "It seemed like it wasn't real."

But was Williams jealous that it was Mitchell who got chosen?

"I told her before the show, 'If you get up there, I'm not going to help you,' " Williams said. "So I did kind of give her a glare [when she got called]. I did try to help her, though. I didn't want to strand her."

Once she was chosen, Mitchell looked to Williams for help on how to bid, but the studio noise made holding up fingers the only way Williams could communicate with her roommate.

"You can't hear anything. It's so loud in that studio," Mitchell said. "You can't think. I really didn't say much. I was really nervous."

After ordering tickets last semester, Williams said she started paying more attention to the prices when she watched the show. Similar prizes are used every couple of weeks, she said, which helped her communicate good advice to her roommate.

Mitchell made the right pick on her fourth chance to bid, using the old trick of bidding one dollar more than the highest bidder and winning the baby furniture.

Although she wanted to play the popular "Plinko" because she could win cash, the player before her got that one. The pricing game she did play, "Coming or Going," Mitchell described as "the easiest game you could play" because there is a 50 percent chance of winning. And win she did, earning the baby grand piano.

Then it was time for Mitchell to spin the big wheel in the second Showcase Showdown.

"It was really heavy," Mitchell said. "It took like all my energy to spin it."

The first spin only yielded her five cents, but Mitchell hit it big the second time around, landing on 85 cents for the No. 1 slot in the showcases, which gave her the option of bidding on the first showcase or passing it.

Mitchell passed on the first one, which included furniture and a trip to China, and instead got to bid on the computer, global positioning system, lawn mower and camper. Getting the signal from Williams, Mitchell placed her bid, winning after she was about $1,000 off.

"I was looking for a car, but a car didn't come up in any of them," Mitchell said. "I guess I was just excited to be up there. I mean, what am I going to do with a riding lawn mower?"

From there, all Mitchell had to do was sign some paperwork, and the prizes were hers. The show is shipping all her winnings to her parents' home in Indiana, Pa.

As for what she'll do with the prizes, Mitchell has already decided to give the computer and printer to her sister, and her parents are contemplating keeping the camper.

And as for the rest: "I'm going to sell as much as I can sell," she said.