photo by: Contributed

Nicole Parker, in red, is pictured on the set of Season 4 of "The Floor" with Molly Sperling and host Rob Lowe. Parker is a nurse practitioner at Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health.

Nicole Parker didn’t win Season 4 of “The Floor,” but she made it to the finale, got to spend a week in Ireland, made a slew of new friends and drank some Guinness in Dublin.

“Oh my goodness, it’s way better in Ireland,” she said of the iconic brown brew.

She liked the food too.

“There was just a lot of potatoes,” she said — not a drawback necessarily, but something you definitely notice, like the beautiful scenery and the people who are “so friendly.”

But Parker, a nurse practitioner from Missouri who works at Lawrence-Douglas County Public Health, wasn’t there for all that stuff. She was there to win “The Floor.”

Many months ago, as she watched the gameshow hosted by 1980s Brat Packer Rob Lowe, it occurred to her that she could be a contender.

She was sitting on her couch watching an episode of Season 2 and saw an ad to apply for the show.

“I was like ‘I could probably do this,’ so I put in an application, sent in a video and just kept getting moved up the process,” she said. “Eventually I got cast.”

photo by: Contributed

Contestants, including Nicole Parker, line up in Season 4 of “The Floor.”

“The Floor,” modeled after a Dutch show, is a trivia game on Fox where 100 contestants compete on a giant interactive floor with 100 squares. Each contestant has a special category — Parker’s was biology — and they go head-to-head in trivia duels until only one person is left. That persons wins a whopping $250,000.

Sadly, that wasn’t Parker, but she did come in third overall.

“It was super stressful,” she said, but also super fun. “I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”

Part of the stress was that the whole season — about a dozen episodes — was filmed in a week. They shot several episodes a day in a studio south of Dublin, where numerous gameshows are filmed due to generous tax incentives. Then they went back to their hotel — a “really cool” historic building, where they hung out in the basement, had dinner and drinks and “would try to study a little bit.”

In other words, it was a bit like college, or as Parker put it, “adult summer camp.”

Some of the contestants she met during the April filming have since become close friends. One of them who lives in St. Louis even came to her daughter’s third birthday party recently.

That wasn’t something she was expecting, given the competitive nature of the show, but it’s been rewarding.

“There’s a huge group chat,” she said. “A lot of them have become really close friends of mine.”

While Parker’s category on the show was biology, other people specialized in categories like holiday foods, geometry, crime-fighting duos, energy drinks, “The Simpsons,” Harry Potter, home organization, PEZ dispensers, paleontology and others. Part of the game is that you can steal someone else’s category. A cancer researcher in the group “definitely wanted to steal my category,” Parker said.

The contestant who won the whole shebang was Ashley Washburn, who entered the game specializing in witchcraft, then inherited Ancient Greece.

The season was filmed last spring, but the finale wasn’t aired until Wednesday, which meant Parker couldn’t reveal any results as friends and coworkers at the health department tried to pry spoilers out of her.

They respected the code of silence for the most part, she said, “but some people were like ‘can’t you just tell me?'”

No, she couldn’t. That’s not the gameshow way — especially if, like Parker, you’re trying to land a spot on “Wheel of Fortune” next.

“That would be so fun,” she said.

photo by: Contributed

Nicole Parker (category biology), in red, is pictured with “Floor” contestants Nicki Abare, left (home organization), Lukas Taylor center (PEZ dispensers) and Bailey Sager (dentist office), right.