Solution to MIT Confessions
As the title suggests, this is a puzzle that takes place (mostly) on MIT Confessions, a Facebook page where students and other people can make anonymous posts (or "confessions") on a moderated platform.
Each post on the Confessions page is given a number in the order of when they are posted, and the puzzle contains eight numbers that correspond to eight confessions on this page. Each of the eight confessions clues a word that ends in the trigram MIT, whose length matches the number of exclamation marks at the end of the confession. Note that the confessions are mostly in past tense to resemble the tone of real confessions, while the words are un-tensed so that MIT always appears at the end instead of being a substring.
| Confession number | Content | Word |
|---|---|---|
| 44933 | I turned in my pset!!!!!! | SUBMIT |
| 45930 | I just released some methane into the atmosphere!!!! | EMIT |
| 45174 | I saw the guy who played Dr. Siddhant Mathur walking down dorm row!!!!! | NAMIT |
| 45367 | I marked the boundaries between my part of the apartment and my roommate's!!!!!!! | DELIMIT |
| 45696 | I just checked in my code!!!!!! | COMMIT |
| 45931 | I told someone about the thing that I did wrong!!!!! | ADMIT |
| 45413 | I hiked all the way to the top of a mountain today, worth!!!!!! | SUMMIT |
| 45219 | I live all by myself and honestly it's the best!!!!!! | HERMIT |
Reading the first letters of the words in order gives the phrase SEND CASH. Now what?
At some point during the research process, we may notice a new confession (posted on the Friday of the Hunt) that reads "I was trying to solve a puzzle from the Mystery Hunt and I realized I actually needed to reverse my final answer!!!!!" This, combined with the previous clue phrase, suggests that the word corresponding to this confession is 5-letters long and also ends in MIT. A word that means "send cash" is REMIT, and reversing it gives the final answer TIMER.