Wisconsin Stories

Dally Du Mez (they/them), Mary Lutton (she/they) and Anna Welter (she/they/he) are all students at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. They chose UWM due to its inclusive nature for the LGBT+ community. Natalie Ng: What big issues do you care about most? What are you most passionate about, or most worried about? Or most motivated by? Dally […]

Mia Heredia, 23, is a Criminal Justice and African Diaspora Studies graduate student at UWM. She has served as the president of UWM’s Student Association for the last two years and is the Graduate Equity Team Lead for UWM’s Honors College. In her free time, she enjoys adding vampire books and movies to her roster, […]

Jesús Velarde-Moctezuma graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in Dec. 2022 with a communications major and Spanish minor, and was raised in Milwaukee. He has been a graduate student since Jan. 2023 under the Translation and Interpreting Studies master’s program at UW-Milwaukee. Apart from being a student, he works at the Roberto Hernández Center as […]

The Wisconsin State Supreme Court race, starting with Feb 21’s primary, is on track to become the most expensive judicial election in state history. The four candidates running to fill Justice Patience Roggensack’s open seat are expected to spend a total of $6 million on the primary alone. There will still be six more weeks […]

It was a sunny afternoon in May 2020, and as the COVID-19 pandemic was raging across America, Dominic Pham, a Philosophy major at UW-Milwaukee, returned home from a demanding shift at his job. Most evenings, he prepared two packets of ramen and a pot of coffee. “It gave me a more conscious consideration to the […]

Maria Belke is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Belke graduated in May of 2022 with a bachelor’s degree in K-12 Theater Education. Belke paid for her education through scholarships, help from her parents, and student loans. Belke was excited to hear the Biden administration’s announcement on the potential student loan forgiveness plan.  “Loans […]

A native of Wisconsin, John Gardner worked hard throughout school to pay for his loans. Gardner said he never took time off and slowly chipped away at his student debt. Gardner’s hard work paid off, and he eliminated the loans. Gardner is now retired from selling insurance and lives in a house he built himself […]

Wisconsin borrowers who receive financial relief through the federal Student Loan Forgiveness plan will have to pay income taxes on the money they receive, costing some of those borrowers hundreds of dollars. Many have responded in opposition to the student loan forgiveness plan entirely. Wisconsin state law calling for income tax on the forgiveness plan […]

Marissa Ziefle was prepared for college. Her college-prep high school drilled academic excellence into students. When she started at UWM, college felt even easier than high school. But as she progressed, Ziefle grappled with a question that millions of students ask themselves each semester: What do I want to do with my life? What followed […]

President Biden has opened applications for his administration’s student loan forgiveness plan, but UWM students still have questions.  Education Data says that in Wisconsin, 727,400 residents have taken student loans. Many of them qualify for forgiveness.  The Student Loan Forgiveness program was announced by the Biden-Harris Administration on August 24 and set to open in […]

Imagine you are playing a game of chess. You are black and your opponent is white. To ensure fairness, the chess game has been assigned a gamekeeper, who is sporting your team’s black color. Before the match begins, the gamekeeper writes out all the plays for both you and your opponent in the order you […]

Hello, fellow Wisconsinites. Election Day is just around the corner, and if you are a college student like me, you may not have done much research on the candidates for Wisconsin governor. Most of my information on the two candidates has come from attack ads, so I am doing a deep dive into the two […]