Terry Oldham hopes he doesn’t see his daughter cry on Sunday, but there’s a chance he will.

His daughter, Jennifer Bertrand, is an interior decorator and owner of Bertrand Designs in Olathe, Kan. Earlier this year, she was selected from thousands of entries nationwide to be one of the nine contestants on “Design Star,” the HGTV realty show where the winner gets his or her own show. At 8 p.m. on Sunday, her fate will be determined as she is one of the remaining three contestants to compete for the prize.

If having designer genes counts for anything, she should make it all the way. Her father is director of the Albrecht-Kemper Museum of Art in St. Joseph, and her mother is a sculptor who has had work displayed in the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, Calif.

But like all reality shows, the competition can be brutal. On the second show, Ms. Bertrand shed some tears when she ran out of time to pull off the painter’s tape in one of the rooms.

“It was absolutely awful,” Mr. Oldham says. “The judge jumped on her, saying it was totally unacceptable and went on and on. I thought, don’t be making my little girl cry.”

Overall, however, the show has been a lot of fun, he says, especially finding out how many local people have been watching and rooting her on, even though she’s not from St. Joseph. If she makes the cut down to two contestants, viewers will be able to vote for the winner on the final show, July 27.

HGTV is Channel 27 on St. Joseph Cablevision.

Sylvia Anderson may be reached at sylviaanderson@npgco.com.