What 'Big Brother' 17 Contestants' Job Titles Mean

On Tuesday morning, in advance of the June 24 premiere of the seventeenth season of the show, CBS released the list of Big Brother Season 17 contestants. Fourteen house guests are moving into a mansion to compete for $500,000 on the show, with Season 17 set to premiere next Wednesday. Big Brother is both everyone's favorite summer hit, and a TV show based on something they read in their high school English class. (I mean, Death of a Salesman doesn't really work on as reality TV.) This season, the ages of the contestants range from 22 to 33, and their occupations from dentist to dealer (of poker).

On the show, a group of strangers live together in a large house and are monitored by security cameras and audio recorders during their stay. Without access to television or the Internet, these people have to entertain themselves and each other, which is often entertaining for us as they hook up and freak out in front of the camera.

Contestants this season include some fairly innocuous sounding jobs, like John McGuire, a dentist from Scranton, Pennsylvania, Audrey Middleton, a Digital Media Consultant, and Shelli Poole, an interior designer. Then you have house guests like Vanessa, a professional poker player from Las Vegas, alongside such occupations as a professional wrester, a college student, and a graduate student.

With increasingly such vague titles, what do these jobs mean, and how will they affect their performance on the show? We're here to help.

Professional Poker Player

Vanessa Rousso plays poker for a living in Vegas, which is basically Professional Lie Detector, reading peoples' eyebrows for signs of bluffing and always calling bullshit when they do. She obviously loves gambling, which makes us nervous that, if she wins the $500,000, she might flush the three months of reality TV torture right away.

Poker Dealer

Contestant Da'Vonne Rogers is a professional poker dealer, which likely means she just loves to sit and watch people in high-stress situations — which is perfect for the show.

Professional Wrestler

Much like how professional poker is about faking it, professional wrestling is even worse. Austin Matelson, a 30 year old from Woodland Hills, California, basically works out full-time, and then makes bank every couple of months by doing fancy WWE choreography.

College Student

A contestant named Steve Moses is a college student from Gouvernour, New York. This basically means he is a party bro who would miss his frat too much over the summer, so he wanted to make sure he would be living in a bro-friendly environment. Or, he didn't get the summer internship he wanted and is going on TV to try and graduate debt-free.

Graduate Student

Contestant Clay Honeycutt has the best name of them all, and is a graduate student at Texas A&M. He is obviously writing some sort of thesis in sociology or anthropology and is moving into the Big Brother house to do research on human behavior. Obviously.

Images: CBS