2023: Fall Contest

Download the PDF below and fill in the answers to the clues...

For this contest, I’ve put an Amherst twist on MentalFloss.com’s weekly Kennections quiz, designed by Jeopardy! champion and host Ken Jennings. The trivia clues might initially seem unrelated to one another, but as you give the answers, a common theme will emerge for each puzzle.

Your Challenge

Fill in the blanks to spell the answers to each clue. For each of the first three puzzles, answers A, B and C will have a common bond that relates to Amherst College in some way, and you must identify the connection. For example, if the answers were FROST, SANCHEZ and WILBUR, the connection would be “famous poets who have taught at Amherst” (i.e., Robert Frost, Sonia Sanchez and Richard Wilbur ’42). Puzzle 4 refers back to the four highlighted letters from the other puzzles’ answers.

Last Quarter’s Winners

Senior Editor Katharine Whittemore challenged readers to crunch down their toughest academic project from senior year to a one-
sentence description. For the magazine editors, choosing the winner was its own challenge.

• First place goes to Bob Sather ’68 for this entry: Numbers are a fiction but we pretend they’re real. The actual title of his senior thesis in philosophy? “Remarks on Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics.”
• Courtney Wieland Jarrahian ’02E takes second place for: There’s no shortcut to cloning a cow. Her biology thesis was titled “A Minimally Altered Primary Cell Line Facilitates Genetic Modification of Bovine  Fibroblasts.” 
• In third place is Ali Khoddam ’23 for: I studied how cells pee. Khoddam’s real thesis title in biochemistry/biophysics was “Utilizing a Hybrid Reverse Genetic Screen to Uncover Dictyostelium discoideum Contractile Vacuole Regulators.” 

Thank you to all who entered the contest!