So You Want to Make a BrassRat? by Richard O. '28
A very very very long year in review.
If you were to ask me what the coolest tradition at MIT is, I would tell you it’s the Brass Rat tradition (and yes, I make this statement with 110% bias).
This past year, I had the amazing opportunity to follow in the footsteps of another blogger, Jessica Z. ‘27, and serve as the chair for the Ring Committee of the Class of 2028 with 11 other amazing committee members.
Now, for people not familiar, MIT has had a tradition of designing and delivering a custom Class Ring to every class since 1930. (I believe this makes our committee the 99th). Over the years, the program has changed to include a number of events related to the Brass Rat, such as a study break, puzzle & scavenger hunts, and a prom-like ring delivery at the end. But above all these things, the one thing that has remained consistent is the ring itself that features hidden symbols, easter eggs, and icons that highlight both MIT culture and the experience of the sophomore class at their halfway point through the institute. In a nutshell, this ring serves as a thread that ties the members of an MIT class together for years to come, and can be a great conversation starter when talking to MIT Alumni.
Now, many (many) old-head bloggers have written about the BrassRat/RingComm as shown in the non-exhaustive list below (partly stolen from Teresa J. ’26’s blog), so I figured this year I’d share a little behind the scenes of the ring from this year with some stories on how we brought it to life.
2026 ring premiere! by Teresa J. ’26
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
History of the Brass Rat by Erick P. ’17
Brass Rat 2016 by Michael C. ’16
RING DELIVERY!!! by Celena C. ’12
The Class of 2010 Ring Premiere by Jess K. ’10
A bevy of beautiful Brass Rat bezels by Matt McGann ’00
and many more…
The Beginning.
So, for some more context, ring committees are historically selected through an application process by the previous committee. So last year during freshman spring, my friend Jaelynn and I were walking back to our dorms when we saw an email saying RingComm applications were due soon, and at that point, I had never heard of RingComm or the BrassRat whatsoever. So we both started talking about how cool it would be to join the committee and decided to rush our applications in. And luckily enough, we both got selected!
So we started the entire thing off by meeting our other committee members and the previous ones in a meeting before the class of 2027’s Ring Delivery last spring. Given that most of us didn’t really know each other, we ended up breaking the ice at an ice cream shop in Cambridge.
After this, we all met one last time as volunteers for the Class of 2027’s Ring Delivery before kickstarting our own year of RingComm, and I will say the 27s set the bar for Ring Delivery really high…but we lowkey were locked in…
The Summer.
Designing a class ring that’s suitable for the likes of Tony Stark is a very, very, very long process. So in the first week of June last year, we began brainstorming and working on our design through Zoom since all of our committee members were scattered around the world.
And for people that don’t know, I am a Figma lover. So, of course, I decided the best way for us to organize all our notes, sketches, ideas, and tasks was to create one giant Figma whiteboard that we could all access virtually throughout the year. And it turns out that this whiteboard also makes a very cool scrapbook for us to see how far we came in terms of the design. So with that, I’ll include some screenshots of our brainstorming process below because it’ll be much easier to show our messy ideas than to try to explain them.
So throughout the summer, we spent several hours each week voting on beavers, logos, buildings, website designs, merch designs, and anything else that was difficult to decide on unanimously. In the end, we had some very funny discussions but came up with some really amazing ideas.
The Fall.
Before we knew it, sophomore year was here, and things started to pick up speed. Our first event of the year was a study break for the class to get input on what things people would want to see on the ring while we continued to design the different faces. And as you’ll see below, we got some very interesting input…
After that, we began to lock in on our design so that Herff Jones could start working on bringing everything to life, and ended with our final product below:
Once we finalized our design, we took a trip to the Herff Jones manufacturing plant in Rhode Island to see how the ring is actually made.
With the ring all wrapped up by November, it was time to prepare for the big design reveal at ring premiere (an event where we reveal the design to the entire sophomore class in Kresge Auditorium) in February. As you’ll see in the premiere section, most of this was writing our scripts, coordinating with E33 & MIT Audio and Visual, designing merch, and recording our videos that would be shown to the class at the end.
IAP & Premiere.
Like the summer, our committee was scattered all over the world during IAP, so most of our work was asynchronous preparation for Premiere.
And then boom. Spring Semester. Premiere, ordering week, and ring delivery. So many moving parts that it almost became a game of guessing what could go wrong.
First thing on the agenda when we all got back to campus, of course, was Premiere. This included but was not limited to:
- 7AM Kresge Auditorium Practices before class
- Making our slideshow
- Emailing our Campus Activities Complex and MIT AV staff to troubleshoot an issue with the projector (that seemed to return on the day of Premiere🥀 but eventually got fixed just in time – can’t begin to explain the fear in my soul that day)
- Make a scrapbook at our last meeting before premiere
- Coordinate a time change on the day before premiere because, of course, the Boston weather machine decided that we needed a snowstorm that week to start at 8 PM on premiere day, which was the time we initially planned to have premiere end, which caused us to spam email the entire class and all the organizations helping us that premiere would now have to start an hour earlier so it could end before MIT facilities would shut down the campus…somehow still worked out though…
So most of premiere is really just us showing the videos and skits we made and then presenting the designs of our ring faces and all the little easter eggs in them. Since the details of each face are a lot to explain, I’ll include our brochure here for anyone who wants to learn more about our design, as well as our premiere recording and video skits: Brochure Link
Full Premiere Recording (Link Here)
Intro Video (Link Here)
- Mainly meant to be a parody of the Liv and Maddie Intro with references to some RingComm members being late to some meetings…
Hacker’s Map Video (Link Here)
- A remake of this running scene from the show, Severance, but with the audio from the intro. Also added a little Subway Surfers section because who doesn’t love Subway Surfers? With the Hacker’s Map being a map of the MIT tunnels, we thought this would be a perfect skit to showcase the underground maze.
Skylines Video (Link Here)
- Based on a British documentary series called “Cunk on Britain,” where the narrator, Philamena Cunk, gives funny and sarcastic coverage of British History. Can check out an example here. Fit really well for the skylines to help us explain the choice for each building/landmark we chose.
Class Side Video (Link Here)
- Decided to do street-style interviews for this side to showcase all the different people that make up our class.
Seal Side Video (Link Here)
- For many of our GIRs at MIT, some classes have these things called learning sequences, which are basically short online assignments with a video and questions you have to answer to give you relevant background information before a lecture. For the seal side, we decided to represent our shared academic experience by making our own little learning sequence spin-off. We were also really lucky to feature a cameo from THEE 3Blue1Brown YouTuber, who was so gracious in sending us a pi-character animation to include in our video.
Bezel Commercial Video (Link Here)
- Now, of course, with the Bezel being the most anticipated part of the ring, we had to build a little suspense with a commercial during our performance. Now for some funny context, we initially had considered doing an old-timey infomercial video like this. But as we were watching these videos for inspiration during our meeting, we started to think about modern jewelry commercials. That’s when we stumbled upon this video: Diamond Desert Sands of Eternity™ | Fully-Traceable Natural Diamonds – YouTube and knew what we had to do.
Bezel Video (Link Here)
- Finally, for the bezel, we decided to do a little mix of cinematic storytelling by making a parody of the GoodWill Hunting movie, which is notably set on MIT campus, and the “Can You Hear the Music” Scene from the Oppenheimer movie. To make the beautiful transition scene that one of our amazing artists (Dianne) came up with at the end, we spent one of our late-night meetings tracing our bezel design using a projector in the Green Building Lecture Hall, and I personally have to say that hearing the audience’s reaction to that transition live will forever be one of my most favorite experiences ever.
Delivery Venue Video (Link Here)
- Lastly, the Ring Delivery Venue video was based on a similar skit from the class of 2027 committee, where we made use of a play on words with the title “Delivery Chair” and added a little James Bond element to the mix.
In the end, I had such an amazing time presenting with all the committee members and seeing everything work out so perfectly.
Richie’s Post-Premiere Slump.
After premiere and the week spent replying to emails during the ordering window, I got LAZY. Jaelynn and Jeff (our delivery chairs) were pretty much carrying the delivery planning, so there wasn’t much for us to do until we got closer to ring delivery. So I mostly prepped the application material for the next Ring Committee while our Vice Chair and Treasurer (Teddy & Livi) prepped our retreat, where we reviewed the next committee’s applications together. Other than that, we pretty much had no real meetings until mid-April.
Delivery.
With the newest committee selected at this point, all that was left for us was to outdo the 2027 Ring Committee and throw the best Ring Delivery MIT has ever seen. And man, did Jaelynn and Jeff deliver (yes, the pun was intended). Glambot. Live Magician. Boston Artist Nick Shea. 360 Photo Booths. Film Cameras. Charcuterie Boards. Giant Jenga and Uno. Not to mention the grandeur of the Boston Park Plaza ballroom. Altogether, they truly made Ring Delivery a night to remember.
So eventually, D-Day arrived, and it was all hands on deck starting at 9 AM that day. From vases of live flowers and backdrops to boxes of playing cards and decor, we had a lot of material to deliver to the venue. But of course, the universe had to throw one last large wrench into our plans before we all retired from RingComm.
Turns out that on the same day, Boston was holding a Parade that shut down a strip of road in the city and backed up other roads leading all the way up to campus. For us, this kind of became a nightmare when the first of two trips that was supposed to take only 20 minutes for our only van to transfer our supplies ended up taking over 2 hours…to get to the venue… So at some point, we realized that carrying supplies in large groups on the subway was lowkey faster and ended up doing that. So despite our plans getting backed up, we made things work. And by 7 PM, we were ready to share our year of work with everyone by opening the doors to delivery.
RingComm overall was one of the best experiences I’ve had at MIT and reminded me why I love working on projects that are meaningful to others. Beyond designing a ring, I learned so much about myself, my project management skills, and the MIT community, and if I could do it all over again, I 110% would.
The end of an era.