A Community of Engineers Celebrates ‘Hoodie Day’

For Yale’s junior and senior engineering majors, community is a warm hooded sweatshirt. Students wear the high quality hoodies—dark blue and emblazoned with the SEAS shield—around campus as a way to collectively declare their engineering talents with pride.

But since 2012, that community-building has begun the very moment the students receive their complimentary hoodies at “Hoodie Day,” a SEAS-sponsored social gathering in the Center for Engineering Innovation & Design. At the event, juniors majoring in any of Yale’s engineering disciplines are awarded their SEAS hoodies, and engineering seniors show off the wear-and-tear their sweatshirts have endured in the past year.

“Hoodie Day has become part of Yale’s culture of engineering,” said SEAS Deputy Dean Vincent Wilczynski. “It’s a great opportunity in the middle of the busy fall semester for students to connect with fellow engineers and swap stories.”

To that end, this year’s event provided hoodies to a record 114 juniors, and students in attendance were also treated to platters of fruit, cookies, and brownies surrounding a central chocolate fountain.

Seniors Kayo Teramoto and Aunica Steele were both excited to see so many engineering students gathered in one space; as members of the engineering honor society Tau Beta Pi, they were responsible for hosting the event. “Our goal for Hoodie Day was two-fold,” said Teramoto, the Tau Beta Pi President, “to give recognition to Yale engineers for their hard work and accomplishments, and to bring together engineers of different disciplines for a night of food and fun.”

But Teramoto also hopes the fun doesn’t stop there. “We hope more events and more traditions can be started to celebrate excellence in Yale engineering,” she said.