Each year at Class Day, held the Sunday before Commencement, soon-to-be graduates from Yale College gather for a festive celebration featuring a notable speaker (this year, the author Min Jin Lee ’90), the awarding of prizes for academic, artistic, and athletic excellence, reflections from class members, and many Yale symbolic traditions.
Among those traditions: headgear of all shapes, sizes, and origins. This year, the Class of 2026 put their creativity on full display, from a 3D-printed tribute to New Haven to a homemade childhood puppet.
Take a deeper look and learn about the inspiration behind seven of this year’s hats.
Christine Dong
Hometown: Honolulu, Hawai’i
College: Davenport
Major: Mechanical Engineering and Physics
The hat: “I wanted this lei poʻo, which is like a lei for your head, which is customary from where I’m from,” said Dong. “And then I wanted something to move, because I feel like I need to do something since I’m a mechanical engineering major. And I like the aesthetic of this windmill situation.”
Alex Moore
Hometown: St. Paul, Minnesota
College: Grace Hopper
Major: Mathematics and Computer Science
The hat: “I was on the college council and have been a FroCo and otherwise very involved in the community, and so I really wanted to represent Hopper as much as possible,” said Moore. “Grace Hopper was a rear admiral in the Navy, and there’s a ship in the Navy named after her. And so for a while I’ve wanted to put that on my hat.”
Maddie Lamm
Hometown: Atlanta, Georgia
College: Berkeley
Major: Biomedical Engineering
The hat: “I really fell in love with New Haven during my time at Yale. I especially love [the] East Rock neighborhood and all the businesses on Orange Street,” said Lamm. “I also wanted to incorporate my love for the 3D printers in the CEID [Center for Engineering Innovation and Design], so I 3D printed a lot of the landmarks in New Haven, East Rock, and West Rock.”
Jaxon Havens
Hometown: Effort, Pennsylvania
College: Trumbull
Major: Anthropology and East Asian Studies
The hat: “It’s a replica of my own shoulders. In my sophomore year, I would wear a brown jacket almost every day,” said Havens. “I like to keep an omamori, a Japanese luck charm, coming out of my tie, so I put that on my head.”
Senlee Dieme
Hometown: Brooklyn, New York
College: Saybrook
Major: History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health with a certificate in French
The hat: “I love wearing my afro out, but I knew that for Commencement weekend I was probably going to put my hair in a different style just to switch it up,” said Dieme. “I knew I wanted to somehow feature my afro in a different way, so I created one out of these pink cups.”
Ayush Tibrewal
Hometown: Lexington, Kentucky
College: Silliman
Major: Mathematics and Computer Science
The hat: “I’m a huge F1 [auto racing] fan. My favorite team is McLaren, so I have one of each of the two drivers,” said Tibrewal. “I just went to the Miami race this year. It was my first ever F1 race in person, so a lot of fun and good memories.”
Morris Raskin
Hometown: New York City, New York
College: Jonathan Edwards
Major: Statistics and Data Science
The hat: “My grandparents took all of my cousins when we were about eight years old to make our own puppets,” said Raskin. “We’ve all kept them with us since then.”
