Magazine

Jessica Schmidt ’26 is probably not a spy. The St. Olaf College senior seems altogether too friendly for that line of work. But one element in her life might give a person pause.

Her “cover story” for operations on campus includes a double major in math and biology, with concentrations in statistics and data science, and mathematical biology. She enjoys participating in Collegiate Chorale and Valhalla Handbell Choir, is the secretary for the Video Game Club, and serves as president of the St. Olaf chapter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. 

However, Schmidt’s real passion is puzzles — just not of the jigsaw variety.

As of April 14, 2025, Schmidt is a master codebreaker. She earned the title after placing first in the individual category and second overall in the international Kryptos cryptography competition hosted by Central Washington University. The event saw Schmidt beat out 151 other students for the win, and as an individual she outranked all but one of the three-person teams.

“I was just so excited about this competition, because I love cryptography so much,” Schmidt says. “Code breaking is such a fun hobby to have. It’s like an escape room, but nerdier somehow.”

Schmidt’s interest in cryptography — the art of writing and/or solving codes — began in her hometown of Glenview, Illinois, when she joined her high school Science Olympiad team and competed in the “Codebusters” event. It was during this time that Schmidt learned dozens of different cipher varieties, and the techniques used to decrypt them.

“I read some books on it, and I have a little notebook with a bunch of different codes that I keep in my pocket when I want to do fun stuff like secret communications,” Schmidt says — despite how suspicious such intel may be. “My favorite cipher is the Baconian Cipher. I think it’s the most fun [code] to break, because the message is in binary, and then the binary is encrypted as something else, so you have a fake message that is nonsense or meaningless, and then it’s secretly another thing.”

Her affinity for this particular cipher type was a major asset on April 10, when the three problems of the Kryptos competition were released. Schmidt was on a bus en route to Junior Night Out at Sky Zone Trampoline Park when she opened the first clue.

“I looked at it, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s the Baconian Cipher, this is fantastic!’” Schmidt recalls. “I was on the bus when the challenges dropped, so I had the problem on my phone and I was using a friend’s phone to break it. I cracked it within an hour, and the competition admins sent me an email saying I was the first one in the whole competition to break that problem.”

She couldn’t immediately move on to the next mission though.

“I stopped because we’d arrived at the trampoline park, and my friends and I had to jump.”

Over the next few days, Schmidt tackled the remaining two assignments in her free time. She finished one between classes on Friday, April 11, but the final enigma came down to the wire.

“The third one drove me a little mad, because the other two I managed to get in a couple hours, but I kept on putting that one off because I would work on it and just not get it — and I thought the competition might end that way, I just wouldn’t get it,” Schmidt says. “I figured a bunch of people had solved it ahead of me. And then the admins sent out an email with eight hours left in the competition to say that nobody had solved it yet. So I thought, ‘Okay, I still have a chance.’”

With a chalkboard, paper cutouts, and some impressive computation, Schmidt was able to crack the code before the 6 p.m. deadline — just behind the first place team, a trio from Eastern Mennonite University. Besides Schmidt, only two other teams of three solved all of the problems, and only one other individual managed to solve a single challenge. For her efforts, the Kryptos admins sent Schmidt a book of codes and their methodology, and a commemorative mug.

“It is very satisfying to win a math competition; I was just pumped about it,” Schmidt says. “The fact that not only did I get first individual, I placed so high overall, I was just so happy — and my cryptography professor was excited because she has a friend who teaches cryptography at another school who had a couple teams in the competition, and I destroyed them.”

Like any good agent would, Schmidt buried the source of her operative orders — probably to give this article a proper spy thriller twist. But it is true that in the spring semester of 2025, St. Olaf offered a cryptography seminar. Taught by Professor of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science and Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (CURI) Director (and potential spymaster) Jill Dietz, the course is meant to train students how to use the mathematical language for encryption and decryption purposes.

“Cryptography is the underpinnings of information security. It’s a really interesting topic that everybody encounters in some form every day, without even knowing it.”
– Jill Dietz, St. Olaf Professor of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science

Dietz notes that it had been almost a decade since the course was offered, when it was then taught by Associate Professor Emerita of Mathematics Kay Smith. After deciding to re-launch the seminar, Dietz was surprised by the number of Oles who were interested.

“It was very popular,” Dietz says. “It was a class of 22 students with a robust waitlist. I think the math majors appreciated the fun in this special topic, and computer science majors, they’re the ones who have to code things up, so I think they enjoyed that. It was well received all around, and it’s not going to go away. The field keeps evolving as any scientific discipline does, and people will stay interested.”

One of those very interested students was Schmidt, who was initially on the waitlist.

“I came to know [Schmidt] because she desperately wanted into my cryptography class,” Dietz says. “She was so enthusiastic that I let her into the class even though it was closed. She’s very bright, and she easily handled all the mathematics in it, but also really challenged herself to work on the computer coding aspect of the course as well. The thing that really struck me though is just that she was constantly having fun.”

It was Dietz who first introduced Schmidt and her fellow students to the Kryptos competition, pitching it as a way for them to test their skills outside of the classroom. Schmidt was the only one to take her up on it.

“I offered course credit, but she didn’t want it,” Dietz says. “She didn’t care about the recognition or any potential supplementary points — she just took on the challenge because she thought it would be fun, and blew everybody away. I think it is just truly outstanding.”

As for any other St. Olaf students interested in becoming a codebreaker, they can keep an eye out for the next cryptography seminar, which Dietz hopes to offer again soon. Schmidt advises getting a head start.

“There are plenty of resources online to find logic puzzle generators, and there’s a lot of really good books out there that can give you an introduction to cryptography,” Schmidt says. “I also recommend just doing math, because it is so relevant to cryptography. What at first looks like fun puzzles is actually just frequency analysis, and then the thing is solved. There are math competitions you can enter as well — I actually spent my birthday this year at one over at Carleton — but either way, just try it out.”

Schmidt is probably not a spy. She’s a self-proclaimed math nerd with a penchant for puzzles. Outside of class, she enjoys a variety of extracurriculars and spending time with her friends. This summer, she had a Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) position at Harvard University, studying the genetics of regeneration in worms — perhaps more mad science than spy thriller after all. But Schmidt hasn’t entirely ruled it out for the future.

“In World War II, they used to recruit for codebreaking work at colleges,” Schmidt says. “They’d ask math professors which students enjoyed crosswords and number puzzles, and then they would receive a shady letter in the mail, and those people would go on to break Enigmalike codes. By God, if I was alive then, I would have had a great time doing that, but will I, in 2025, make a career directly in cryptography? Probably not — unless the CIA comes knocking.”