They didn’t just earn degrees. They left love behind.
It’s easy to measure a college career in semesters, deadlines, or major requirements. Harder—but more honest—is to measure it in sidewalk cracks, library shadows, unexpected detours, and the smell of eucalyptus after it rains.
This May, our graduating seniors wrote love letters—not to the idea of a degree, but to the place that held them through every version of themselves they became here.
In Love Drafting, Jessie Fisher stitched together those versions with quiet brilliance. It’s a time capsule threaded with football chants and film screenings, protests and playlists, Skittles between classes and epiphanies on Bancroft. It’s a letter to a campus that changed shape as the world did—through pandemics, reckonings, tech waves, and long nights spent figuring out who we are.
Melissa Mora-Gonzalez wrote to the trees. The redwoods she walked past every morning. The ones that taught her to slow down, to breathe, to listen. “They were the first thing I fell in love with at Berkeley,” she writes. In that one sentence is a whole education—a reminder that sometimes what shapes us most has no syllabus at all.
Gavriel Curameng’s video letter offers another form of love: the kind shared behind the camera. As a content creator for @ucberkeleylife and @caladmissions, he spent four years telling stories for others—now, he tells his own. It’s a tribute to the Pilipinx community that made him feel seen, and to the small, powerful practice of documenting joy in real time.
Kelcey Lyng Christen’s letter doesn’t use paragraphs—it uses pigment. A B.A. in Art Practice, Kelcey’s work explores the collision between natural networks and man-made systems. Her final pieces—clay, light, weeds, ink—are meditations on exposure, chaos, and intention. In her hands, storytelling is tactile. It’s something you fire in a kiln, bury in a garden, or hang from a ceiling. It’s goodbye— in the language of form.
Christopher Jackson Yu arrived at Cal from Virginia, knowing no one and nothing of what was ahead. Four years later, he leaves not only as a mic man who led stadium chants, but as a student director on the Cal Alumni Association board, a fraternity brother, and the manager of Berkeley’s student comedy scene. “At Cal,” he writes, “the only limit to what you can do is your imagination.” His love letter is loud, bright, and unfiltered—just like the Cal spirit he came to embody.
Together, these letters form something more than memory. They’re not goodbyes. They’re promises. To carry this place in the way we listen, organize, create, question, and belong. To remember how the chimes of the Campanile always found us—no matter how lost we felt.
Berkeley didn’t just give them knowledge. It gave them language. And that language sounds like love.
