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I’m Among the Last ‘Hangovers’ (But Not the Ones You Think)

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Once upon a time—including when I matriculated on the Hill in the early 1960s—engineering was a five-year program

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By Barry Bendel ’64, BEE ’65, MEng ’66

Every summer, alumni from the Ivy League gather here in San Antonio, TX, to meet the incoming freshmen—the local kids about to head off to Philadelphia, Providence, New Haven, Ithaca, and the rest.

We tell them what to expect: what to pack, which professors to seek out, and how cold it actually gets.

This year, when it was my turn to introduce myself, I said something I don't think anyone in that room had heard before: “I’m the last of the Hangovers.”

I had to explain it, of course.

Most people who know the name at all know it from the Glee Club’s a cappella group, the Hangovers, founded in 1968 and still singing today.

But the name didn’t start with them. They borrowed it. And the thing they borrowed it from is gone.

For about 20 years, from World War II until 1965, the College of Engineering ran a five-year undergraduate curriculum.

The name 'Hangovers' didn’t start with the Glee Club’s a cappella group. They borrowed it. And the thing they borrowed it from is gone.

The change had come out of wartime necessity, and departments adjusted their programs from four years to five, one after another. Mechanical engineering’s first class to reach the new fifth year did so in 1950–51.

By the time I arrived, the fifth year was simply how things were done. You finished what everyone else finished in four years, and then stayed for one more—hanging over, in the slang of the place, into a year most of your classmates didn’t have.

That’s where the name came from. Not from a song, not from a joke invented later—from an actual fact about your transcript. If you were in a five-year program, you were, literally, a hangover. And we had a verse too.

Barry Bendel as a freshman — The author as a freshman in 1960.

Cornell has always had a song for this kind of thing—“Song of the Classes,” written by Frank Abbott 1890 his senior spring, with a verse for each class: the freshman, homesick and green; the sophomore, shedding his freshman manners; the junior, self-satisfied; the senior, coasting to the finish.

Somewhere along the way, someone added a fifth verse for us. It wasn’t gentle.

It leaned on the other classes the way the rest of the song did—freshmen dismissed, sophomores mocked, juniors waved off—with the particular swagger of people who’d earned the right to look down on everybody still on schedule.

The final two lines: “We don't give a damn for the whole junior class / And as for the seniors, they can all kiss our …” (The last word, which you can surmise, would be drowned out by the chorus.)

We sang it because it was true. We really were hanging over. Nobody else in the room could say that line and mean it.

In 1965, Cornell reverted engineering to a four-year curriculum. I watched the four-year Class of 1965 graduate along with me and my classmates, who'd matriculated as freshmen with the Class of ’64.

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By the time I arrived, the fifth year was simply how things were done. You finished what everyone else finished in four years, and then stayed for one more—hanging over, in the slang of the place.

Some of us raised a stink about it; the University had changed the deal midway through.

Although we had signed up for five years—and paid five years of tuition—we got the same degree that those coming after us would earn in only four, not to mention the salary and experience we lost by entering the workforce a year later.

Cornell heard us out. We came back for one compressed semester and left with the brand-new master of engineering (MEng)—a professional degree invented, in part, to make good on what was owed to a class caught in the gap.

A male student uses a slide rule in class — Rare and Manuscript Collections

That made 1965 the end of it. No incoming class after us would ever again be five-year engineering students. No one after us would ever again have to stand up to sing that verse and mean it.

It kept getting sung for a few years afterward, I’m told—the Glee Club still had “Song of the Classes” in its concert repertoire into the early 1970s—but by then it was inherited, not lived, and sung by people performing a tradition rather than describing themselves.

I watched the four-year Class of 1965 graduate along with me and my classmates, who'd matriculated as freshmen with the Class of ’64.

Three years after we left, a group of students—several of them themselves five-year “hangovers” of the old kind—started an a cappella group and took the name for their own reasons. The word outlived the thing it used to mean.

I don’t know if the verse is still sung anywhere. I don’t know how many are still left who sang it when it was true—we’re all pushing 85 now, if we’re still here at all.

A group shot of men in jackets and ties who were in the Cornell 5-year engineering program in the 1960s — Electrical engineering's five-year Class of 1965; Bendel is number 19.

What I do know is that when I stood up in front of that room of 18-year-olds today and called myself “the last of the Hangovers,” I was handing them a small, strange piece of something that is very close to finished.

Not a tragedy—just an ordinary kind of ending, the sort that happens to every institution, every generation, every verse of every song, eventually. Someone is always the last one who can say a thing and mean it literally.

That day with those incoming Ivy League freshmen, I got to be that person.

After decades in engineering and management positions, Barry Bendel ’64, BEE ’65, MEng ’66, founded Bendel & Associates—specializing in what’s now known as cybersecurity—in 1999. He remains active in the business and in the Cornell alumni group for the San Antonio area. He and his wife have five children and seven grandchildren.

(All images provided, unless otherwise indicated.)

Published August 19, 2026

I’m Among the Last ‘Hangovers’ (But Not the Ones You Think)

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