Geno (the women’s basketball coach for UConn) goes to the grocery store and finds that Wheaties is placing pictures of UConn women’s basketball players inside its cereal boxes. A total of 6 players are featured, each appearing with equal probability. Find the expected number of boxes Geno needs to buy in order to obtain pictures of 3 different players.

Hint: let X be the total number of cereal boxes that Geno buys and let Ni be the number of boxes that Geno buys to get the ith player after obtaining the i − 1th player. Then, X = N1 + N2 + N3. What type of random variable is each Ni? You’ll also need to use the fact that the expected value is linear.