Born and raised in New Orleans, Vedant has only lived in East Boston since July 2025. (He actually moved to Boston to attend Commonwealth.) But you’d be forgiven for thinking he grew up in the area, given the depth of his community involvement. In the months since, Vedant has become a vocal advocate for his new neighborhood of East Boston, as well as the Massachusetts Youth Climate Coalition and other organizations, recruiting several of his fellow Commonwealth students along the way. Here he explains his homegrown commitment to fighting climate change, the “fun kind of suffering” in Geometry Advanced (his favorite class, he swears!), and the key to getting involved as a student. 

Getting to Know You

What is bringing you joy right now? 

Doing the play [Big Love by Charles Mee]. Even though it is stressful, rushing to finish memorizing lines and blocking scenes, it's a really fun environment, because there are so many people around you who are in the same boat. You’re all making progress until the show comes along.

What is your favorite book (or a book you’ve re-read)? 

One book I always say that I read a couple of years ago is The Client by John Grisham. In a nutshell, it's about an eleven-year-old kid who has a single mom and an eight-year-old brother, and he and his brother witness a murder. They later find out that the murder has ties to a dangerous gang in New Orleans, and by witnessing the murder, they end up endangering themselves. As a result, the eleven-year-old, due to his mother’s and brother’s incapacitation, hires a lawyer. I won't spoil the ending, but I just couldn't put it down. 

What are your favorite comfort foods? 

That's a tough one. Personally, I am vegan, so I can’t have any animal products. If I had to choose one food, though, it would be these fried tofu cubes that my mom makes. They’re breaded in this Indian chickpea flour called besan, so that gives it a different texture from your typical fried tofu, and she adds a little garam masala, chili masala, and spices like that, just to really make the flavor pop. 

What was/is your favorite class (at Commonwealth or elsewhere)? 

I love this question! I have answers for both. From my time in New Orleans, it was my eighth-grade algebra class. The teacher—his name is Mr. Duvoisin—was really great in the sense that he understood the different kinds of students who came to his class. So whether you wanted more advanced algebra or math wasn’t really your thing, he understood how to tailor his teaching methods. And not only that, but he made the class very interesting with his goofy attitude.

Here at Commonwealth, right off the bat, I can tell you my favorite class is Geometry Advanced. It’s a different style of mathematics than I was used to; it’s a lot more logically focused, and it really forces you to think about the foundations of not just geometry but the whole discipline of mathematics. Additionally, I feel like the classroom environment is just so friendly. I love Ms. Bernstein as a teacher. I hope she reads this, because she's genuinely one of the best teachers I've ever had. But it's also the other students in the class that make it one of my favorites. It was quite challenging at the beginning of the year for not just me, but for everyone taking the course. I always like to say that over time, we formed a little Geo Advanced family as we solved problems together, and also suffered together—but it was a fun kind of suffering, because we had each other for company.

When do you feel the most enjoyably challenged?

When the endeavor to find the solution to a problem is a bit more challenging than expected. “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the journey,” know what I mean? For example, yesterday, on my Geo Advanced homework, I was having a lot of trouble with this one problem. But instead of giving up because it was hard, I found myself just not wanting to step away from it. Everybody else was struggling with it as well, so I wanted to be the one who overcame the challenge and helped others overcome it as well.

What never fails to make you laugh?

I know this is a little clichéd, but it’s whenever we're all just hanging out, and someone mentions something funny that happened in a previous class or at recess. So I guess what never fails to make me laugh is when I get to hear about what others view as funny. What made them laugh makes me laugh.  

What are people most surprised to learn about you?

Probably that I'm from New Orleans, and I moved here eight months ago. So flashback to eighth grade, my parents wanted me to apply to schools all around the country, because I wasn't being challenged enough at my middle school. So I applied to thirteen schools across the entire U.S. It's actually kind of funny, because my dad just went on Niche.com and chose the top fifteen schools, one of which was Commonwealth. I ended up choosing Commonwealth because we didn’t just look at the school itself when we applied but also the surrounding area. To my family and me, Boston was the perfect intellectual environment where there were a lot of community initiatives and opportunities to get involved, which led us to choose Commonwealth, located right in the middle of the city. I'm also just glad I had parents who were willing to uproot their whole lives to come here, just so I could have a better learning experience. 

Pen or pencil? 

Probably pencil, because nine times out of ten, I'm gonna erase something.

Coffee or tea?

I like peach-flavored tea, because even though it’s very subtle, you still get the fruity flavor.

Fall, winter, spring, or summer?

I’d probably choose summer. Being from New Orleans, you gotta love the heat. Especially here in Boston, where other people are like, “Oh, I love winter. I love spring.” I'm like, “That's way too cold for me.” I think the coldest it ever got in New Orleans was forty-five degrees, so this being my first Boston winter, it was a little bit of a rude awakening.

Life as a Commonwealth Student (and Beyond)

What was your first impression of Commonwealth and how has it mapped to your experience?

When I was first applying, I heard about Commonwealth being right in the middle of Boston. The way it was phrased was that “Boston is your campus.” Now, going to Commonwealth, that is a lot more true than I thought it would be. Especially in the second semester as a ninth grader, you have a lot more freedom to leave the building and go to the BPL [Boston Public Library] or a nearby cafe or something like that during a free period. 

In addition to that, there’s just the notion of Commonwealth being a very small school. As a student, I definitely feel that, but more importantly, I also see how that shapes the culture. When I heard about the school’s 5:1 student-to-teacher ratio, I thought to myself, “Wow, Commonwealth must have a really individualized culture.” And I think that really shows in classes and in the advisor program as well. 

So, basically a lot of what I heard about Commonwealth throughout the admissions process has been pretty consistent with what I've experienced so far.

Using metrics besides grades, how do you define “success” in your classes?

One really big part of it is, of course, class participation. I feel like it's one thing to know the material; it's another thing to be able to articulate your ideas to your teacher and to your classmates. 

Another way I define success in my classes is just generally having a good time in the learning journey. Again, going back to the Geometry Advanced example: it's an extremely tough class, and I haven’t always done exactly as well as I would’ve liked to. But to me, that’s not necessarily a big concern. After all, I'm having a great time learning the material, surrounded by a great teacher and exceptional classmates who support each other every step of the way. I think that's really the most important part: enjoying what you're learning.

You’ve been a vocal advocate for climate change activism from your earliest days in East Boston and at Commonwealth. How did you get involved in this particular work? What inspires you? What keeps you going? 

It all started back in New Orleans. Growing up, I'd always heard about climate change and its ravaging effects on communities, with New Orleans being a big city that’s also incredibly close to the water. Not only did I learn this in school, I also experienced it firsthand, having to deal with multiple hurricanes, one of which forced my school to close for a month and forced me to evacuate to Orlando. So the main gateway to my activism was my interest in the climate crisis that's currently affecting Boston, our country, and, frankly, the entire world. Moving to East Boston only grew that interest, because it’s an environmental justice community that’s highly disproportionately affected by climate change. This led me to learn a lot more about the community-engagement side of solving the climate crisis.

Over the summer, I did an internship with a community food organization called Eastie Farm. There I learned not only about how the climate crisis is affecting East Boston but also about how it's especially impacting a lot of moderate-to-low-income families and leading to other issues in the community, such as food insecurity. It was through that summer internship that I found out about another statewide coalition called the Massachusetts Youth Climate Coalition, which I joined midway through the summer. For their Advocacy Day, we had biweekly planning meetings as well as weekly Sunday meetings. To be honest, the meetings didn’t actually take up too much time; what was more time-consuming was the work outside of meetings, like doing a lot of outreach, networking with other members of the coalition, and stuff like that.

Additionally, although it’s not necessarily activism, I do community-engagement work with members of the Eastie community on the effects of climate change. For example, another community organization I work with is called Tree Eastie. They essentially plant trees all over East Boston in order to relieve the neighborhood of the heat-island effect. East Boston has the lowest tree canopy out of all neighborhoods in Boston, meaning people who live there are a lot more prone to the effects heat can have on your health, because there's not a lot of shade that can provide relief. So that's the problem Tree Eastie seeks to solve. 

The funny thing is, literally two days after I moved to East Boston, my parents and I were just walking around the neighborhood, and we came across one of Eastie Farm’s gardens, which was just a block away. We talked to one of the people farming there, and we learned more about Eastie Farm’s mission and all the things they do. From there, someone at Eastie Farm told me about Tree Eastie, and someone at Tree Eastie told me about this other local cleanup initiative called Eastie Clean and Green, and I got involved with them as well during the summer. And the Massachusetts Youth Climate Coalition reached out to Eastie Farm, asking them if they wanted to be part of the coalition, and while Eastie Farm turned down the opportunity, that was how I got involved. So one opportunity just sort of fell onto my lap, and from there I got to network and learn more about these other local community initiatives.

How do you find time for your advocacy work?

The Commonwealth workload is demanding, and sometimes I did think about skipping a planning meeting for Advocacy Day or not going to a community event for Eastie Farm because I had some assignment to complete. However, I almost always still ended up going. It’s hard to describe, but I feel a sort of obligation inside myself to attend these events. Because even though the Commonwealth workload is quite rigorous, it’s also important to learn how to balance it with your extracurriculars. In my personal experience, that just took a lot of experimentation, learning how to split up time for homework and my community work. 

How else do you spend your time outside of Commonwealth? 

I have a talk show on YouTube called Slay It. I started it the summer before eighth grade. I realized that there’s a lot of teens out there, like me, who need a role model who can provide them with advice and an example of how to achieve excellence in a certain field—making themselves, their environment, and their community better. With that in mind, I created Slay It, in which I invite people who have exemplified that excellence, and I interview them on how they got to that level, what challenges they encountered along the way, and what advice they have for people who want to follow in their footsteps. Since then, I've branched out a little bit. (My most recent post was a solo video in which I broke down the MBTA.) But I'm planning a lot more videos; I want to invite some members from the state legislature and even some Commonwealth teachers, so keep an eye out. 

You recently spent your Project Week shadowing your state representative. How does your activism dovetail with politics?

I've always wanted to make a difference in stopping climate change from destroying communities, and I quickly learned that the most efficient way to do that is through politics, by passing policy that requires people to be more environmentally conscious in some way, shape, or form. One example I always love to bring up is how Barack Obama used to be a community organizer in Chicago's South Side. That allowed him to understand what people, especially economically disadvantaged people, really wanted for their community, which helped him get into the world of politics. And if legislators aren't doing the best for their people, are they really legislators at all? So I feel like by being a part of community organizing and by engaging with members of the community, I can learn more about what issues are affecting them and how to pass legislation that alleviates their problems by representing their voice and what they know is the best for their community. 

When I interned with Eastie Farm, I got to meet Adrian Madaro, who represents East Boston in the state legislature. He voiced his support for a lot of Eastie Farm’s work and came to a lot of their events, which gave me the opportunity to talk to him about his time at the legislature, why he supports Eastie Farm, and subjects along that line. About a month after my internship, I reached out to the representative’s office and asked if I could shadow him for Project Week. Through that experience, and by attending a community event centered around taxation for lower income people, I really gained a deeper understanding of how politics can help ensure a community is getting what’s best for it and its members.

When do you feel most connected to other students (or teachers/staff members) in our community?

Probably when we're all working towards a common goal. Let me bring up Mock Trial for example. We recently were working on a case, trying to brainstorm some solid arguments and solid questioning, and win the side we were arguing for. And working towards that really allowed me to bond with the other people doing Mock Trial, but I think it goes far beyond that, like in my classes and my other extracurriculars as well. 

What’s your advice for prospective students considering Commonwealth? 

Do not let the immense workload deter you at all! I'm here to tell you that it actually will help so much with your time management. At my old school, when I was doing homework, I guarantee you that, every four or five minutes, I'd be looking at my phone or getting off topic in a similar fashion. Whereas at Commonwealth, the workload has allowed me to really lock in on the task I'm doing while still enjoying what I'm learning. The teachers here are not giving you busy work that's completely meaningless. Once again going back to Geometry Advanced as an example: even though the work for that class is quite rigorous, it really allows you to learn so much more because of the amount of thought involved. It helps you understand what you're learning and why you're learning it. 

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