When you first meet Ilhan Omar, you notice a sort of subtle warmth. The kind of subtle warmth that puts strangers she meets at ease. When she enters Precision Grind Coffee in Minneapolis, the café we agreed to meet at for this interview, she’s on the phone and waves at me, but isn’t ready to talk yet for another five minutes.

The summer before my sophomore year at Edina High School, I had my first awakening of what it means to be black in America. What it means to always “fit the description.”. What it means to never be given the benefit of the doubt. I was 16. Before that August night, I was innocent in all the ways you expect a sheltered suburban kid to be.

In the five years between college and becoming a school counselor at South View Middle School, Paul Andress held just about every odd job imaginable. He was a youth director at a church, worked construction, worked in a pet supply warehouse, was a custodian, and even tried his hand at telegram singing for a year.

On a sunny Thursday in June of 2014, President Obama landed at the Minneapolis-Saint Paul International airport. From there, he made his way down to South Minneapolis to meet with a local woman who had written to him about the economy and hardships that she and her family were facing. adhering to his image as a man of the people—he chose a neighborhood burger joint.

When Abdirahman Kahin immigrated to Minnesota in 1997 from Somalia, getting into the restaurant business was the furthest thing from his mind. He had no formal training as a chef and said he didn’t know the first thing about starting his own business. One thing Kahin did know was that he wanted to be an entrepreneur, and he was determined to do whatever it took to make his dream a reality.

In everything I read, the movies I watch, and the music I listen to, I’m always looking for the next thing that will transform me, add to me, and make me feel. With music, I mostly stick to Hip Hop and RnB — genres that were my friends in my formative years and introduced me to singers who looked like me but wrote songs about things that my adolescent mind was not familiar with.

Four years ago, Ahmed El Shourbagy got an idea to start an Instagram page dedicated to posting pictures of dogs. He called it ‘Dogs of Instagram’ and his first post was of his dog Lucy, a pug and Boston terrier mix. Within 10 days, he had 1,000 followers. He met Ashley Paguyo on that day when he walked into a focus group she was conducting for a mobile start-up company that she worked for.

A plan to build sound walls on the east and west sides of Interstate 35W is putting the Minneapolis Department of Transportation at odds with residents of the Marcy-Holmes and Southeast Como neighborhoods. The proposal to build a 20-foot-high wall along the freeway between Fourth Street Southeast and Johnson Street Northeast has been put on hold following strong negative feedback from the residents.

A plan to build sound walls on the east and west sides of Interstate 35W is putting the Minneapolis Department of Transportation at odds with residents of the Marcy-Holmes and Southeast Como neighborhoods. The proposal to build a 20-foot-high wall along the freeway between Fourth Street Southeast and Johnson Street Northeast has been put on hold following strong negative feedback from the residents.

A plan to build sound walls on the east and west sides of Interstate 35W is putting the Minneapolis Department of Transportation at odds with residents of the Marcy-Holmes and Southeast Como neighborhoods. The proposal to build a 20-foot-high wall along the freeway between Fourth Street Southeast and Johnson Street Northeast has been put on hold following strong negative feedback from the residents.

Emily Lowery enrolled in an architecture course last May hoping to learn about different architecture and landscape design solutions. She walked out as part of a team of students who would design the University of Minnesota’s first ever ecologically friendly bike pasture –– a combination of bike parking, social space and a garden.

Even with student loan debt totaling $1 trillion and a weak job market, some University of Minnesota students will graduate debt-free because they worked their way through college. More than 60 percent of University students graduated with debt in 2010. The average student left with more than $27,000 in student loan debt.