Solution to Semester at Sea

This puzzle features two 10 x 10 grids of letters and a healthy amount of flavor text. A nautical theme is strongly clued by the title and flavor text. The first instruction of the flavor text says to "identify the classes you want to take." After careful inspection of the top grid, you will notice that it's a typical word search and that the identified words correspond to ship classes. Finding all the words in the grid will yield 10 left over letters, which when read in LEFT to RIGHT, TOP to BOTTOM order spells BATTLESHIP. This clues that the puzzle is mimicking the board game of the same name. At this point one may notice that all the ship classes correspond to one of the five types of ships commonly used in the board game (Aircraft Carrier, Battleship, Submarine, Cruiser, and Destroyer).

The next instructions in the flavor text say to "plan your attack" and "use everything at your disposal" in order to "finish on top." Examining the bottom grid you will be able to identify that all the words correspond to types of missiles. While some of the missile types are quite obscure, they can all be confirmed using the internet. Finding all the words in the grid will yield 5 left over letters, which when read from LEFT to RIGHT, TOP to BOTTOM spell SHOOT. This however, to the surprise of more than few, is not the final answer. The flavor text says you need to "finish on top." This next step can be interpreted in two ways. You can either take the positions of the 5 letters in SHOOT and map them to the top grid or you map all the missiles to the top grid and only the 5 spots and 5 ships corresponding to the letters in SHOOT are left remaining. Similar to how you might play a game of battleship. From these reamining letters you will get a nonsense string of letters MRAOL. Once you notice that each letter came from one of the 5 ship types, you should order the letters by ship size (or canonical order they are listed in the game) from largest to smallest, as weakly hinted by the flavor text "get what is left of your life in order." Doing this provides the final answer: MOLAR. Alternately, a brute force strategy would have worked - anagramming the letters yields only two common 5 letter words (MORAL and MOLAR).