2026 ring premiere! by Teresa J. '26
and what led up to it!
★ a recounting of Premiere
(Oops, it’s been like 1.5 months since) Ring Premiere happened!
For almost a year now, I’ve had the privilege of being on the Class of 2026 Ring Committee! Ring Committee, also known as RingComm, is a group of twelve students tasked with designing the Brass Rat for their class.
If you don’t already know, the Brass Rat is a class ring that MIT undergraduates receive at the end of their second year. It has an extensive history (that I won’t go into but you can read about it here and here) and has made appearances on the fingers of Tony Stark, the John Harvard statue, and soon, my classmates.
In the several months leading up to Premiere, RingComm had been moving in silence. standing on business, even. working on the ring design in private. In order to ensure the secrecy of the design until Premiere, we even resorted to taping CVS pharmacy receipts and crumpled pset packets over the door window of the classroom where we’d meet twice a week.
But on February 10th, it was finally time to unveil the design to the entire class!
The day started off rather unassuming. For the first few hours, my tasks consisted of lugging boxes of t-shirts and toothpick holders,01 i wasn't talking about shot glasses at all. why would you even think that. blowing up balloons and fluffing up decorative pom-poms, and testing how far I could reasonably chuck various mini beaver Squishmallows into the auditorium seats. By 5pm, we’d finished running through our dress rehearsals and setting up decorations. All that was left for the committee was to get changed and get hyped.
At 6:30pm, doors opened. I was holed up backstage as my classmates were filtering into Kresge Auditorium, but I could slowly hear the ambient sounds get louder and rowdier as more and more people filed in. At some point, I poked my head out to assess the crowd situation, and saw various greek life/living communities and friend groups dressed in funky hats and group costumes, as is custom for Premiere.
Finally, at 7:05pm, lights dimmed to outrageous cheer.
This year RingComm tried something a little new for Premiere – we filmed short little video skits to play before each duo walked on stage to present. By the time Hailey P. ‘26 and Sean H. ‘26, our Co-Premiere chairs, walked on stage to kick us off with the Hacker’s Map, the decibel levels in the room were insane. Shrieks and hollers broke out every half a sentence, and the crowd only got louder as the presentation progressed. Sabrina C. ‘26 and Jamie O. ‘26 were up next with the Cambridge and Boston skylines, followed by Nathan K. ‘26 and Vicky C. ‘26 with the Class Shank, and then Marco A. ‘26 and Katrina L. ‘26 with the Seal Shank. I practically knew everyone’s lines by heart and I could still barely figure out what anyone was saying over the noise.
Jamie came back to present the winner of the Puzzle Sprint,02 which is super cool, and you can check it out at this link: http://brassrat.mit.edu/2026/puzzlesprint who won a free 14k gold ring! After that, at long last, it was time for me and Ann L. ‘26, two of the artists on RingComm, to present the Bezel!
As our video faded out and we walked on stage, we were greeted by a wall of sound. The sheer enormity of Premiere kind of hit me all at once. We forgot to track attendance, but Kresge seats around 1200,03 so basically somewhere between twelve and twelve-hundred people attended, i think and from what I could see squinting against the bright lights, it looked pretty damn close to being full. People always say that Ring Premiere and Ring Delivery are some of the few events in your undergraduate career where you get to see so many people in your class all gathered in one place, and I knew this, but it was still absurd to witness. After months and months of hard work and sealed lips, we were finally getting to show the class of 2026… the Bezel!
…just kidding. Ann and I actually had the honor of presenting the Joke Bezel, i.e. a silly, fake Bezel that usually precedes the actual Bezel, because we haven’t kept our class waiting long enough.
After getting boo’d offstage (lovingly, I’m sure), we handed the batons to Helena U. ‘26 and Maggie Y. ‘26, RingComm Chair and Vice-Chair, to finally present the real Bezel! With that, the entire ring design had been unveiled!
Overall, lots of elements of the design remain similar to what you traditionally see on a Brass Rat, but we added a few unique elements that I particularly like. On various sides of the ring, we show an archer beaver, a sailing beaver, a pistol beaver, and a fencing beaver, to represent the four P.E. classes needed to obtain a Pirate’s License at MIT.
Additionally, we included a night sky motif across the ring as a nod to how, like the beaver, our best work as MIT students often happens at night. For example, the Cambridge Skyline, which is usually depicted in the daytime, was shown against the night sky in our rendition. Even the hacker’s map took the form of a starry constellation, to guide us through the tunnels just as people once used stars to navigate the seas. (Also, if you look closely, you can see a beaver hidden in the Hacker’s Map constellation – we managed to feature a beaver on every face of the ring!) If you’re curious about the rationale behind other design details, feel free to read more here!
The hype hadn’t ended just yet though. Marco and Katrina, our co-Delivery chairs, returned to announce where the class of 2026’s Ring Delivery would be held! Ring Delivery is the big fancy event where everyone actually gets the rings that they ordered post-Premiere. This year, our Delivery is going to be on May 5th, at the top of the Prudential Center!
Finally, the night was coming to an end. Ring Premiere concluded with the committee members each launching an aforementioned beaver Squishmallow into the crowd! With that, it was a wrap!
★ a recounting of being on RingComm
Just to be upfront, being a member of the class of 2026 Ring Committee is a lot of work.
The first time the twelve of us all met as a group was actually volunteering for the class of 2025’s Ring Delivery. Our first opportunity to get to know each other was through forced proximity – the ‘25 Ring Committee had us running around sorting over a thousand rings alphabetically, breaking down cardboard boxes, squinting at IDs and spamming Ctrl + F on a check-in spreadsheet, desperately tracking down literally any person who knew how to refill the water dispensers, and whatever other mundanities our class of 2025 overlords demanded04 just kidding, the 25s are chill, and so was ring delivery <3 fear not, future class of 2027 ring committee members ^_^ of us.
However, our work didn’t really begin until a few months later, during the summer. Our first task was to design a logo that would be used later down the line for all of our posters, brochures, website, etc. After many car-ride sketches, Zoom calls in a hotel kitchen in the Canadian Rockies, and only an hour (not bad!) of mulling over slightly different hex codes of gold, we finally had our logo!
Our next biggest undertaking was actually designing the ring, which took six hours of meetings per week over a big chunk of fall semester.
I think a lot of people, MIT students included, have kind of a misconception about how this process actually goes. Not everyone on the committee is an artist; rather, roles range from web chair to publicity chair to treasurer to being in charge of the various events we hold throughout the year, such as study break, Premiere, and Delivery. (Also, shout out to our Chair and Vice-Chair <3) Historically, a minority of the committee actually has the title of an artist. The class of 2026 RingComm, for example, has three – me, Ann, and Vicky.
By no means are we the only ones who played a hand in the design of the ring, though! In fact, it truly is a group effort. All of the committee members spent a lot of time poring over past websites, logos, ring designs, etc. picking out elements we liked or didn’t like. This helped us decide our direction for the ring design and/or the general ~vibes~05 we ended up going for a more playful, unserious vibe as opposed to a more professional one, shown through the doodles on our instagram posts and the silly pictures when you hover over the committee member headshots on the website :) we wanted to give off. On top of that, each member brainstormed various elements we thought would memorialize the class of 2026’s MIT undergraduate experience.
As artists, our job was to help turn the ideas of the committee into reality. If someone wanted to play around with the idea of including a solar eclipse on the seal shank, or see what the soccer players on the bezel would look like shifted a millimeter to the left, we were on hand to quickly sketch or make adjustments so the committee could see how the design was shaping up in real time.
On top of that, we worked closely with professional artists from Herff Jones, the company that manufactures our rings. They gave us immediate feedback on how well certain details would translate to the small surface of the ring, and ultimately they were the ones who drew the final designs and 3d models in order to manufacture the actual rings.
Each side of the ring came with a lot of iterations. Each time we’d meet, we’d add new ideas or cut back on others; we’d make the tiniest microadjustments, like changing the beaver’s tuft of cheek fur on the Bezel or making sure the Lobby 10 doors are centered on the Class Shank; we’d do everything we could to make sure the design was as close to perfect as we could get it. Below are just a few out of the dozens of iterations06 the google doc we used to document bezel changes/ideas is literally 60 pages long... we made for the Bezel!
Artists had other responsibilities, too! We were in charge of making designs for everything from posters to stickers to t-shirts! A lot of our work was concentrated around fall semester, but we were on call year-round to help make pubbing materials and merch for all the events.
So yeah, RingComm is undoubtedly a lot of work. But I love it nonetheless!
I think it’d come out kind of cheesy and try-hard if I attempt to explain how much RingComm means to me. It’s become a huge part of my life, not just because of the six hours of meetings every week. Everyone on RingComm is so awesomely clever and fun to work with. They’ve become my ride-or-dies; we’ve weathered many ups and downs as a committee, and I’m so excited to see all of our hard work be celebrated at Ring Delivery.
Not to mention, to know that I got to play a part in designing something so iconic, so steeped in tradition and ceremony, is amazing to me. I’ve seen Brass Rats on superheroes and in local cafes, and soon, come May 5th, nearly 98% of my classmates will own the very Brass Rat I helped create. It’s unbelievably fulfilling and mind-blowing.
As a preview, all twelve members of RingComm have a temporary, sample Brass Rat07 mine is a 10k white gold ring with a small bezel size! in various colors and sizes so our classmates can get an idea of what they’ll actually look like. At Ring Delivery, we’ll swap in our placeholder ring and receive our actual ring alongside everyone else! As it stands, I’m pretty used to wearing chunky rings, but the Brass Rat carries a different weight to it altogether. I guess the knowledge that donning one means I’m joining the ranks of decades-worth of Brass-Rat-wielding MIT students gives it a little extra heft.
★ further reading! (sorted chronologically ish???)
★ life, with the brass rat by Kanokwan T. ‘25
★ 2024 ring premiere! by Mel N. ‘24
★ Ring Delivered by Kathleen E. ‘23
★ Ring Delivery 2021 by Cami M. ‘23
★ 2022 Ring Premiere by Shuli J. ‘22, MEng ‘23
★ 7 Rings by Afeefah K. ‘21
★ Class of 2020 Ring Delivery by Danny and Allan G. ‘20
★ Class of 2020 Ring Premiere! by Danny and Allan G. ‘20
★ RecomMITed by Kevin S. ‘19
★ Ringing in the second half of MIT by Anelise N. ‘19
★ Spotted: A Brass Rat in the Wild? by Chris Peterson SM ‘13
★ Brass Rat 2017 by Erick P. ‘17
(alternatively, just look up ‘brass rat’ on the admissions blog page and scroll in case i missed anything!! it’s almost easier to explain the impact of the brass rat on the MIT undergrad experience by pointing you to all the times it gets mentioned in blogposts about nostalgia and aging and being an MIT student and whatever else.)
★ bonus: hacker’s map iterations + joke joke bezels
- i wasn't talking about shot glasses at all. why would you even think that. back to text ↑
- which is super cool, and you can check it out at this link: http://brassrat.mit.edu/2026/puzzlesprint back to text ↑
- so basically somewhere between twelve and twelve-hundred people attended, i think back to text ↑
- just kidding, the 25s are chill, and so was ring delivery <3 fear not, future class of 2027 ring committee members ^_^ back to text ↑
- we ended up going for a more playful, unserious vibe as opposed to a more professional one, shown through the doodles on our instagram posts and the silly pictures when you hover over the committee member headshots on the website :) back to text ↑
- the google doc we used to document bezel changes/ideas is literally 60 pages long... back to text ↑
- mine is a 10k white gold ring with a small bezel size! back to text ↑