Career and Co-op Center’s Tiffany Medeiros Is a Nationally Ranked Jigsaw Puzzler
Image by Ed Brennen
02/17/2023
By Ed Brennen
As assistant director of cooperative education, Tiffany Medeiros helps place Francis College of Engineering students in co-op jobs that align with their career goals.
Fortunately, Medeiros excels at seeing the big picture and finding the right fit.
Medeiros, who joined the Career and Co-op Center in 2021, is a nationally ranked jigsaw puzzle competitor. She was 34th in the country heading into last October’s USA Jigsaw Nationals in San Diego, where she placed 12th in the individual competition by completing a 500-piece Ravensburger puzzle in 1 hour, 3 minutes and 48 seconds (9 minutes behind the winner).
That earned her a spot in the 2023 World Jigsaw Puzzle Championship, taking place this September in Valladolid, Spain.
“I always really liked puzzles,” says Medeiros, who would do them “from time to time” while growing up in Dracut, Massachusetts. (Her dad, John Medeiros ’86, and sister, Gabrielle Medeiros ’11, are UML alumni and her mom, Shawne Smith, earned an associate degree here.)
“I was craving community, because I wasn’t hanging out with people in the same way that I did before COVID,” says Medeiros, who earned a bachelor’s degree in industrial engineering and a master’s in college student development and counseling from Northeastern University, where she worked as an academic advisor before joining UML.
Googling her interests, Medeiros found the USA Jigsaw Puzzle Association. She learned that she could participate in virtual competitions right from her apartment — with each contestant receiving a sealed puzzle that they would open on camera at the same time. She also learned about local in-person competitions and a nationwide puzzle club that meets virtually once a month.
“It’s a very welcoming community,” says Medeiros, who traveled to Minnesota in January for her first Saint Paul Winter Carnival, home of the biggest team puzzle competition in the country. She supported friends competing in the four-person team event, something she would like to try someday.
While laboring for hours over a 500-piece puzzle may seem quaint in this age of virtual reality video games, TikTok and Netflix, Medeiros says the demographics of the jigsaw community are surprisingly broad.
Medeiros, whose pièce de résistance is a “brutal” 3,000-piece “Where’s Waldo?” that took her weeks, has around 100 puzzles in her collection at home. She recently began donating some of them to the Lawrence Lin MakerSpace, where she holds weekly office hours for electrical and computer engineering students.
“A lot of students spend so much time there, and they started requesting jigsaw puzzles to work on during breaks. But they knew nothing about me — they just thought it would be fun,” says Medeiros, who finds puzzling to be a great way to not only relax, but also improve hand-eye coordination and spatial intelligence.
“I’m continually learning,” she says. “Every puzzle I do, I’m slowly picking up new things and seeing what works better.”
Like most kids, Medeiros was taught to start with the edges of a puzzle first. But she rarely does that in competitions, she says, as she finds it too restricting space-wise.
Image by Ed Brennen
Medeiros says she gets mixed reactions when she tells students in her Professional Development seminars about her puzzle prowess.
“Some people are interested and ask me questions, and some people burst out laughing, which is the normal reaction people have,” she says. “But I’m like, ‘You can have any reaction you want. This is so fun for me.’ And yeah, it’s nerdy, but I love it.”