alumni

Stanford Engineering Puzzle

June 2008

For thousands of students, June means just one thing around here: graduation. Time to get out into the real world and show one's stuff. Or to go on to graduate school and show one's stuff. Well, anyway, we all have stuff to deal with. That is the premise of this month's puzzle. A whimsical logic teaser in which recent graduates who've gone off to startups become involved in a mixup in the delivery of some stuff of the sheepskin kind. Use the clues below to deduce all the information about the students involved.

Graduation goofup

After graduation, five students who were friends at Stanford all go off to work at similarly named startups on the same street in Sunnyvale. They are listed in the grid in the order they exist on the street. At the request of their new employers, they each order copies of their degrees from the registrar, but unfortunately the letter carrier gets confused and each student gets a degree belonging to one of the other students. Your job is to deduce each student’s full name, the degree each student earned, the degree each accidentally received in the mail, and which company each one works at.

  • 1. Hilary works at Yooco.
  • 2. Andy, who works at one of the three companies in the middle, earned the BA/MSE. Hilary works next door to the student who received the MS/CEE.
  • 3. Student Padden, who didn't receive the BS/ME, works two companies away from student Kruger, who earned the ENG/EE, and one company away from Laura.
  • 4. Channing works at Ciscoo, but didn't receive the BS/ME. Student Smith, who doesn't work at Ciggle, earned the PhD/CS but received the degree that student Lansing earned.
  • 5. One student’s first and last names end with the same letter.
  • 6. Student Powers didn't earn the BS/ME. The BA/MSE was not delivered to Channing's company.
  • 7. Laura, the student at Yoogle, earned the degree that Brad received. The student at Goohoo, who didn't receive the PhD/CS, works next door to where the degree the student earned was misdelivered.
  • 8. The student who received the PhD/CS at Ciscoo is the one who earned the BS/ME.

When you have finished the puzzle, make sure to e-mail Marge Kastner with the following information to earn credit toward your puzzology degree and to win a chance to be listed below:

Student Powers' first name, the degree he or she earned, the degree that was mistakenly delivered to him or her, and the company where he or she works.

June logic puzzle

All entries, listed here or not, will be entered in the "Alumni Permanent Record" and count toward honorary degrees in Puzzology next June. To check out the degree earners for June 2007, please see the Puzzology page. Every 10th solver will be listed until the last weekend of the month, when the final entries will be awarded the "Weekend of Fame" before the next puzzle page is posted. So keep your solutions coming in.

"Winning" entries

  • 1) Michael Connors
  • 2) John Paff
  • 3) Wah Kwok
  • 4) Linda Knudsen
  • 5) Rafael Zenteno
  • 6) Tony Lillios
  • 7) Kristin Granlund
  • 8) Eric Van Os
  • 9) Charles Medler
  • 10) Mike Simmons -- tied with
  • 10) Paul Swenson
  • 20) Anand Rangarajan
  • 30) Woodrow Pollack
  • 40) Anthony Vitale
  • 50) Eric K. Chen
  • 60) Sharon Hume
  • 70) Eric Schwartz

Do you want to try your hand at past puzzles? Go to our Archive page.