Tag Archives: Riddles

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Title: The doctor vs the engineer

General Information about Item:

  • verbal folklore, joke/Riddle
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Eric Krivitzki
  • Date Collected: 5-11-19

Informant Data:

Professor Eric is an Aerospace engineer who have worked in the field for 15 years and decided to get a new challenge in Academia. So he decided to pursue his phd at Dartmouth. As a Phd, he is the instructor for the fluid lab. Before each lab meeting, he asks his students to come with an engineering related joke.

 

Contextual Data:

  • Social Context: Engineers love this joke and always laughs at it however, doctors usually takes offense even though the jokes depicts worse because of the amount of people they can harm at once.
  • Cultural context: Doctors suffer pressure that engineers don’t. The life of patients depend on the doctor in the moment. When the patient dies, the doctor usually takes it personally because he couldn’t save a life that he felt responsible for.  For engineers, the idea that someone could die is abstract because it will be in the future. Even if it happens, engineers usually work in teams so they don’t usually feel responsible for the deaths.

Item 

what’s the difference between an engineer and a doctor?

A doctor kills one person at a time.

Informant’s Comments:

  • it’s one of his favorite jokes even tho he says: “it’s not appropriate”

Collector’s Comments:

As a potential/future engineer, I like the joke.

Collector’s name: Pierre Desvallons

Introverted engineer vs Extroverted engineer

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Title: Introverted engineer vs Extroverted engineer

General Information about Item:

  • verbal folklore, joke and riddle
  • Language: English
  • Country of Origin: United States
  • Informant: Eric Krivitzky
  • Date Collected: 5-11-19

Informant Data:

Professor Eric is an Aerospace engineer who have worked in the field for 15 years and decided to get a new challenge in Academia. So he decided to pursue his Phd at Dartmouth. As a Phd student, he is the instructor for the fluid lab. Before each lab meeting, he asks his students to come with an engineering related joke. So he’s a great repertoire for jokes

 

Contextual Data:

  • Social Context: : Engineers are known to be “nerds” which means that they are not very social. This jokes is often use by engineers as a way to self ridicule themselves and nice Ice breaker.
  • Cultural context:  This jokes only works in the West. In our society, we consider direct eye-contact to be friendly. So someone who does not make eye contact is considered to be awkward. In some cultures, making direct eye contact is considered rude or even a challenge. Avoiding direct eye contact, culturally, is a form of showing humbleness and direct eye-contact may seem even hostile and rude.

Item 

How do you tell the difference between an introverted and extroverted engineer?

An introverted engineer looks at their own feet when they are talking to you, an extroverted engineer looks at your feet when they’re talking to you. There is no such thing as  an extroverted engineer.

Informant’s Comments:

Sometimes people don’t get the joke instantaneously so he has to explain it to them.

Collector’s Comments:

I didn’t get the joke at first until he gave me a brief explanation.

Rope Burning Riddle

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Genre and Sub Genre: Verbal Folklore, Riddle/Brainteaser

Language: English

Country where Item is from: United States

Informant Data: Brendan Krimsky is a Dartmouth ’17 majoring in Computer Science. He grew up in Florida and is a member of the Kappa Kappa Kappa fraternity. Brendan participated in the Summer and Fall 2015 corporate recruiting cycles. After college, he is looking to work in a tech company, possibly as a software engineer.

Social Context: This folklore was collected during an in-person interview in Baker-Berry library. Brendan participated in two recruiting cycles, but did not end up finding his internship on campus. He interviewed for technology firms, and this riddle is from an interview he had for Magic Leap.

Cultural Context: During in-person interviews, students will often be asked non-traditional questions such as riddles or brain teasers. Though this may seem off-topic and irrelevant, these questions are often seen as true tests of a candidate’s intellect. They also serve as stress tests for students to see how they handle questions they aren’t prepared for as opposed to the usual technical questions that everyone prepares for. Getting the correct answer isn’t necessarily the point, though; more so these questions are used to see how an applicant thinks through problems.

Item: During Brendan’s Magic Leap interview, he was asked to try to solve a brain teaser about measuring time with burning ropes. After answering several technical questions correctly, the interviewer told him that this would be his last question and asked him to think through the problem out loud. Brendan was given a minute to come up with his response, and though his answer was not the “right” answer, the interviewer said he was more interested in seeing how he logically broke down a problem.

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file): Interview audio was not recorded.

Transcript of Interview: “I flew down to Florida where Magic Leap is for my second round interview. The interview went well at first, we started off with the usual technical questions about some of the languages I know and concepts like greedy algorithms and dynamic programming. After that, the interviewer paused, grabbed a cup of coffee and when he came back he said he was done asking me technical questions because it seemed like I knew my stuff. His last question was a riddle – he asked me ‘You have two ropes that each burn for 60 minutes, and a lighter. How do you measure out 90 minutes using just the ropes and a lighter?’
I didn’t know how to respond so I made something up about folding the second rope in half to burn it twice as fast. He said the right answer was to burn the first rope from one side and the second one from both sides, but he didn’t end up caring whether I got it right or not. He just wanted to see how I thought through the riddle.”

Informant’s Comments: N/A

Collector’s Comments: N/A

Collector’s Name: Sachin Vadodaria

Tags/Keywords: Verbal Folklore, Corporate Recruiting, Riddles and Brainteasers

Riddles and Brainteasers during Interviews

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General Information about Item:

  • Genre and Sub Genre
    • Verbal Folklore: Riddles and Brainteasers
  • Language: English
  • Country where Item is from: US

Informant Data:

  • Informant is a Dartmouth Student in the Class of 2017. He is from Westchester, NY and is studying Economics with minors in Public Policy and Environmental Sciences. He is involved in multiple extracurriculars on campus, including Dartmouth Business Journal, Varsity Swimming, Dartmouth Investment and Philanthropy Program and Policy Research Shop. He has gone through the corporate recruiting process Fall 2016.

Contextual Data:

  • Social Context: This folklore was collected in person on audio recording during an one-on-one interview during the Fall 2016 Dartmouth corporate recruiting season.
  • Cultural Context: Informant is a Senior studying Economics at Dartmouth – a typical participant of corporate recruiting as mostly Juniors and Seniors in Economics go through recruiting. Informant has worked at a large bank prior to interview, but the job was not obtained through the corporate recruiting process.

Item:

  • Interview riddles and brainteasers are frequently shared among participants of corporate recruiting. Both consulting and finance interviews occasionally have one or two riddles or brainteasers. These riddles and brainteasers are frequently shared among participants of corporate recruiting because riddles and brainteasers are harder to prepare, as there are so many variants. These riddles and brain teasers are meant to the interviewees thinking and analytical abilities.
  • Some common brain teasers include:
    • How many heart beats does a human have in a year?
    • If you could have infinite lengths of rope, how would you cross the Grand Canyon?

Associated file (a video, audio, or image file):

  • Audio file not included because informant wished to remain anonymous.

Transcript of Associated File:

Informant’s Comments:

  • NA

Collector’s Comments:

  • NA

Collector’s Name: Emily MA

Tags/Keywords:

  • Verbal Lore, Riddles, Brainteasers, Interviews, Corporate Recruiting