Obtaining a degree (or multiple) from UC Berkeley is no small feat.
Nobody provides the playbook for balancing academics, work, extracurriculars, relationships and play. Yet somehow, we built it anyway. This chapter of our lives is over, and we hope that you like — and are proud of — the person you’ve become. As we all take down the photos from the walls, move out of our apartments and turn toward a new life, the graduating class of 2026 at The Daily Californian is proud to present a tiny snippet of ours.
Congratulations, UC Berkeley class of 2026!
— Chrissa Olson
The conclusion I’ve come to is the following: Yes, turns out, I have no argument. The last four years have been a series of unpredictable silliness, and I suspect the next four years (to put a number on it) will be more or less the same. I’ll probably change my mind again, do a bunch of random things, take many, many walks and still hate writing about myself.
— Ananya Rupanagunta
It’s in the past four years that I have discovered my true passion: talking. Talking on the phone, grabbing a gratuitous beer or a coffee at Strada, catching up with my roommates in bed at night, letting meetings run too long because we got too caught up in our own long-winded ideas.
— Clara Brownstein
Four years ago, I began working on a 1,000-piece puzzle rendition of Hokusai’s “The Great Wave off Kanagawa” with my best friends in our freshman dorm. It took us three weeks, a series of midnight study breaks and approximately 17 iced green teas to complete.
— Izzy Nunes
I thought I was done with journalism. I was wrong
But if the test of faith in my freshman year taught me anything, it is that nothing can keep me away from reporting. Journalism is an unforgiving profession: low pay, high stress and thankless 99% of the time. That rejection may have been a sign to turn tail and run.
— Alexa Vazquez
Everything moves. Everything returns, in some form or another. Like the moon, life is cyclical. It asks you to trust phases you don’t fully understand while you’re in them. The moon has always known this. And now, finally, I do too.
— Amara McEvoy
The Daily Californian has given me a lifetime’s worth of memories. As I graduate and head into the world with clear goals in mind, I know the experience also paved the path for me to create a lifetime of memories moving forward.
— Kyle Ngo
There is a serene beauty to the idea that there are people who come into our lives of their own free will and choose to stay, not because of some Hollywood script-like romance but because you have become a source of familiarity to them.
— Rae Wymer
I’m not looking to impart knowledge as much as I am passion. When I watch someone light up at the thought of copy editing or writing an investigative piece, I get access to just a second of that extra special idealism. It’s not the same as my own idealism, at least as I (idealistically) imagine it was, but it gets close. All I can do is take comfort in the fact that while being here, I’ve done all I can to connect with my campus and my city.
—Ella Carter-Klauschie
Retracing my final undergrad footprints
There’s no log of all the in-between moments: Strawberry Creek burbling as I walk over the bridge, grass tickling my ankles, golden hour over the Campanile through the trees. The video doesn’t show everything I’ve learned in my time here.
— Nichelle Wong
I will never forget my first September weekend in Berkeley. I had spent my morning studying with friends in the Unit 1 lounge, laughing while attempting to work on my readings. I spent the nights going out to frat parties or discovering new restaurants. Though I was having fun, it was the strangest experience to be exploring, studying toward a degree and spending quality time with friends rather than attending my 11 a.m.-6:30 p.m. ballet rehearsals.
— Emewodesh Eshete
Suddenly, I am back in my childhood bedroom in Texas, the one I painted lime green when I was 11, struggling to write my college application essays, trying to prove my thoughts, my experiences, my life had been enough .Now, the problem is the opposite. UC Berkeley has given me more than I even know how to hold. I thought writing this column would force me to find the right words. But maybe the inability to find them is the reflection.
— Arfa Momin
If I could go back in time, I wouldn’t
I no longer need to question my worth, my identity, my purpose. I no longer need to worry about the choices I made or regret the paths that I took. Because of everything that has happened in the last four years, I have become the person that I am today.
— Emily Hamill
No, the world didn’t end at 19
In the end, I don’t think it matters what changed things for me, because something did. I came to understand that my environment, my people, my circumstances were within my control, so long as I stopped trying to fit into spaces that simply weren’t meant for me. Everything and everyone I needed had always been there; it just took me a little while to find them.
— Eleanor Dalton
This dream’s only feeling kind of sweet
For the past three years, I’ve lived in my sorority house on Warring Street. There’s a frat next door that’s constantly playing music, usually Mac Miller, Drake and other party tunes. But a week ago, it was something different.
— Roxana Nourishad
Apart from an incredible education, my time at Berkeley, both campus and city, has helped me find bits and pieces of myself scattered throughout its people and its culture, and shaped me into someone capable of stepping out into an uncertain world knowing that I’m going to be OK. And isn’t that what it means to have found a home?
— Ahana Sur
“My father died” is a very irritating sentence to have to write for the rest of your life. It’s an even more startling sentence to think as you’re trying to figure out when you’re taking graduation pictures.
— Keemia Zhang
37 and thriving: How UC Berkeley changed my life forever
There was one itch I never scratched, a nagging presence that never went away: Maybe I could become a journalist. Even now, it sounds crazy: hopping into a world I knew nothing about in my 30s to do something I had never done.
— Eric Urbach
You don’t get to hate the Daily Cal unless you love it
Having joined the paper as a reporter the summer before college, I made my best friends in the Daily Cal’s news department. But at the same time, I had seen how the demands of news editing had severed relationships, ruined academic transcripts and destroyed people’s mental and physical well-being. I was adamant that that would not be me. I was committed to never letting the Daily Cal take over my life.
— Amber X. Chen
Looking back, I can recognize that by allowing myself the freedom to change my mind and occasionally botch things, I eliminated a lot of the suffering that is wondering what could have been. My time at UC Berkeley also gave me a lot of stories to tell, ensuring I am well on my way to becoming the eccentric aunt I believe I’m destined to be.
— Antonia d’Auria
I believe that the act of loving is itself an exchange — whether of memories, secrets, intimacies, sentiments or even past versions of ourselves. To love something is to hold it as your own, but also to relinquish a piece of yourself. There is something miraculous about consuming something you love, since it embodies the very dynamic that loving requires.
— Mikaela O’Brien
A goodbye from a person who hates goodbyes
As graduation looms closer, the future is about to become my present, but I genuinely don’t know what comes next for me. Will I find my dream job? Will I take time off to travel? Will I doom and gloom at home? Will I be back at UC Berkeley for another first day of classes?
— Aditya Hariharan
How beautiful it is to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard, especially since I feel like I am the happiest I’ve ever been in my final year at UC Berkeley. As I embark on a new, exciting but somewhat uncertain chapter in my life, I’m grieving the community and life I’ve built over the last four years. It’s bittersweet, but more sweet than bitter.
— Lucía Umeki-Martínez
It is easy to reduce all of this to a line on our resume, to a set of outcomes that can be measured and compared. However, that feels a bit beside the point because this education has made things less simple. It has made it harder to ignore what does not make sense. Harder to stop asking questions once you have started. So the onus, now, is on us — literally!
— Meiya Gujjalu
On my plane ride to my last spring break trip with my friends, I went through my iPhone gallery like any sane person with no signal does. I ended up all the way back in 2022 when I first moved into Christian Hall in Unit 1. I quickly found my way to my second year at UC Berkeley, with only 92 photos and 14 videos to my name that first critical year. At the same time, I took 36 gigabytes, or 1,200 photos, for the Daily Cal.
— Jun Oh
The Instagram caption of my graduation photos reads, “3 years, 2 degrees, 1 girl.” I thought of it long before I even took my grad photos, playing on a countdown and my journey to double majoring within three years. While the caption does gloat about my achievements, that is not why I am writing today.
— Anastasia Mileeva
Play in the space between the notes
Like sheet music, we all play by measures; our weeks are made up of the measures of course units, deadlines, exams, pints after exams and 10 minutes of Berkeley Time. Yet as we play the tune, measure by measure, we also play in the spaces between the notes, the music notes, the lecture notes.
— Joshua Speer