Students studying political science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology tend to mostly wear red or black undergarments.
In Course 16 — or aerospace engineering — it’s all about blue and white, in what may be a nod to the color of the sky and clouds.
As for biology and biological engineering students at the Cambridge school? They like animal print underwear. Naturally.
That’s all according to a study by one enterprising student of data that was scraped from thousands of e-mails shared among undergraduates.
On Monday, Lydia Krasilnikova, who is studying molecular biology and computer science at MIT, published her findings about student underwear preferences to the school’s admissions blog.
The brief debriefing, which she titled the “MIT Underwear Exposé,” is accompanied by a breakdown of Krasilnikova’s methods and hand-colored pie charts reflecting who wears what.
The cheeky information was shared widely online among her peers this week, as well as by school officials.
“I adore this data,” said Krasilnikova, 24, a graduate student. “It’s a different type of picture of MIT’s dorm culture. I absolutely love it, and it was so much fun to put together.”
Krasilnikova said the idea for the project started when she came to MIT as an undergraduate in 2010.
She quickly learned that, due to a strange tradition started years earlier, students in the Burton-Conner dormitory would add to the bottom of e-mails, sent through a mailing list, the color or pattern of underwear they had on.
Most social groups on the school’s campus — from departments to clubs to dorms — have their own mailing lists. When e-mails about event announcements or lost items are sent to more than one group, and they include Burton-Conner, others join in the underwear fun.
“By signing with your underwear color you are saying, ‘My e-mail is worth reading. I am willing to tell you my underwear color if you’ll read my e-mail, that’s how worth reading it is,’” according to a history of the tradition on the admissions blog.
Over the years, and through thousands of messages, the wealth of data on the self-reported underwear colors piled up in Krasilnikova’s inbox like a load of dirty laundry.
One month, she downloaded the e-mails and used a computer program, or script, to sift through them and extract the underwear data. Then she analyzed it.
Krasilnikova broke down her findings by undergraduate dorm, non-dorm living groups, days of the week, class year, and majors. She then made the pie charts.
She emphasized that her results are by no means a scientifically accurate portrayal of what types of underwear students are wearing. It’s likely that many students sign their e-mails with witty responses, or make up bizarre underwear patterns — like “Pikachu” print — just for laughs.
But she still got a decent snapshot of dorm culture, she said.
“It’s showing personality just through color. . . . It’s a self-representation,” she said. “And I really like that.”
On Wednesdays, for example, female students tend to wear pink underwear, according to the e-mails. Krasilnikova likes this subset, she said, because it could be a reference to the movie “Mean Girls.” In one scene of the film, the female antagonists declare that, “On Wednesdays we wear pink.”
Political science students, the data show, wear red or black underwear, “which feels sort of political sciencey,” Krasilnikova said.
Electrical engineering students have a “wide variety of colors and underwear patterns,” which Krasilnikova feels is reflective of the major as a whole.
“It’s a diverse department,” she said. “And you can see that in the pie chart.”
Looking at the days of the week, she found that on Saturdays, students slip on yellow underwear. On Sundays, students get silly with the prints. As students get older, she said, underwear choices become bland.
“If you look at it by class year, every year the blue underwear goes up. Meanwhile, the multicolored underwear, it starts low, and then goes down. And by senior year, it’s zero,” she said. “It’s kind of a sad story.”
People have given the project a warm reception. It was shared more than 2,200 times from MIT’s admissions blog, and later tweeted from MIT’s main account. The school indulged in a little hype, praising the findings as the “definitive and scientific guide to MIT students’ underwear colors.”
On the community discussion forum “Hacker News,” others were also tickled pink by the idea.
“Reading this made me downright sad that I didn’t, and probably never will, attend MIT,” one person wrote. “Oh, the interesting people! The interesting projects! How I wish I had worked harder.”
Steve Annear can be reached at steve.annear@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @steveannear.