Chaudhuri during the 2025 Rausser College Commencement on Sunday, May 18. Photo by Mathew Burciaga
Shreya Chaudhuri, Rausser College of Natural Resources’ 2025 student commencement speaker, credits visiting Assam—the region of India her family is from, and a community on the frontline of climate change—with spurring her interest in the environment.
Born and raised in the Bay Area, Chaudhuri knew about UC Berkeley’s reputation as a leading research university when she was first accepted. Four years later, she has a new appreciation for UC Berkeley that transcends any university rankings list. To her, Berkeley is where students can draw on their diverse histories, traditions, languages, and dreams to shape their experience.
“What makes Berkeley extraordinary isn’t just the institution—it’s the people,” she told the crowd from the stage of the Greek Theater during commencement this past Sunday evening. “It’s the communities we build, the questions we dare to ask, and the movements we dream into existence—especially when they feel impossible.”
As a new graduate with degrees in Environmental Science and Geography, and minors in Global Poverty & Practice and Data Science, Chaudhuri developed a passion for Indigenous sovereignty, Traditional Ecological Knowledge, and equitable climate solutions. She drew on those lessons to help revitalize Project Planet, the nonprofit organization she founded in high school, to focus on decolonial environmental education; to develop the DeCal course “Decolonizing Environmentalism;” and to lead the Decolonial Environmental Network at the Student Environmental Resource Center (where she also worked as a Climate Action Fellow).
“Within the environmental spaces at Berkeley, I had hoped to see more environmental justice curriculum and programs,” she said. “But the beauty of the College of Natural Resources and UC Berkeley is that it didn’t just allow us to create the spaces we wanted, but rather Berkeley invited us with tools—and the autonomy—to make our own spaces….As students, we are handed the chalk, the mic, the podium, and empowered to act.”
Recognizing her classmates as a cohort of “storytellers, seed planters, policy dreamers, good troublemakers, healers, changemakers,” Chaudhuri credited the diverse campus community as a key component of UC Berkeley. She pointed to student efforts to grow culturally relevant food at the Gill Tract and groundbreaking research on redlining and urban ecology as examples of the impact of individual voices and viewpoints.
“Berkeley reminds us that our liberation is tied together,” she said,” and that progress isn’t about erasing difference—it’s about embracing it.”
While Chaudhuri recognized that many of her classmates would graduate “into a future that feels terrifying and tender all at once,” she reassured them that their voice and their impact can help build a better world.
“You are graduating from the university of Nobel Prizes; of the Free Speech Movement; of the Third World Liberation Front,” she told her classmates. “You walk in the footsteps of giants—and you are someone’s future ancestor. Someone, someday, will want to walk in your footsteps.”
Watch Chaudhuri’s full speech below, as well as the rest of the College’s 2025 commencement ceremony.