Stanford Engineering is home to nine departments, which are in turn the intellectual home bases for faculty and students of different disciplines. The core role that departments play in academic life cannot be overstated. The departments can, however, be abbreviated. Each department is quite often referred to by its signature abbreviation and those aconyms are the basis of this month's puzzle.

Directions for puzzle
In this puzzle your job is to assemble the abbreviations for all nine Stanford Engineering departments by moving and rotating the tiles so that the letters on their edges match up at the corners. In the proper solution, only one abbreviation for each department must be assembled, so you will have spare parts left over. For fun we will post (below) the names of every ten alumni who successfully complete the puzzle and e-mail the secret word in the subject line to staff member Marge Kastner. She'll post the first 10 correct responders and every tenth right answerer after that.

You must have Flash installed to run this puzzle, which was designed by Scott Kim of Shufflebrain and programmed by Larry Doyle of Cyberiandesign.

All entries, listed here or not, will be entered in the "Alumni Permanent Record" and count towards Honorary Degrees in Puzzology next June. To check out the degree earners this year please see the Puzzology page.

"Winning" entries

We sincerely apologize to the puzzlers who tried to work in Firefox or Safari. Our techs were consumed with confusion as to why it isn't working and a special thank you to Darin McGrew whose suggestion fixed the problem and additional help from Eric Juline.

So, as consolation, we're listing your names for honorary mention:
Yuji Higaki, Kyle Bruck, Paulo Kirschner, Bill R, Eric Van Os, Dave Lennert, Sophie Traweek, Jack Chou, and Jason Townsend. The "Beyond and Above" award goes to Julie Newell. Thanks for the head's up.

All solvers will have their achievement entered on their permanent record for honorary degree consideration in June. The first 10 solvers and then every 10th solver will be entered below until the last week in November. So keep those solutions coming in.

    1) Mark Aragon

    2) Stephanie Sud

    3) Michael Connors

    4) Wah Kwok

    5) D. Downing

    6) Jim Mulready

    7) John Shield

  8) Monty Estis

    9) Evan Wagner

  10) Linda Knudsen

  20) Jupe Hale

  30) Tony Lillios

  40) Don Bentley

  50) Derrick Blohm

  60) Nicholas Reeck

  70) Olivia Oo

  80) Alan Abbott

  90) Rusty Schweickart

100) Danny Dokko

110) Luis Burgos

120) Nicolas Lee

130) Terry Rassieur

140) Eric Schwartz

150) Schuyler Ullman

160) Robert Filman

170) Jeff Muller

180) Navid Yazadani

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