Her voice quavering only once at the end, Anne-Fleur Goll concluded her impassioned HEC Paris commencement speech with a plea to tackle climate change: “Every cog drives the system and you can be one of them. Merci beaucoup.”

The 25-year-old masters in management graduate, who co-founded a climate transition campaign group during her time at the Paris business school, used the ceremony in June to urge her contemporaries to play their part in the environmental crisis as soon as they started work. Her speech received a standing ovation from the hall of more than 1,000 graduates, prompted calls from a dozen journalists and led to some 2,000 invitations to connect on LinkedIn.

“I’m kind of scared to open LinkedIn now,” says Goll, who now works as a climate consultant for Deloitte in Lyon. “My audience was full of people who one day will be leaders of companies and organisations and will have the tools to shift the system, and my aim was to make everyone question their role and responsibility in that shift.”