By Natalie Hotaling

INDIANA -- Snow lightly circles through the air on a chilly morning in mid-November. As a harsh wind picks up, Isaac J. Samay pulls his knit cap lower on his forehead. He steps his beat-up sneakers into the straps on his bicycle pedals and takes a deep breath.

His daily commute to campus begins.

Samay, 23, of Johnstown, is a political science major at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. The senior has been biking as his sole means of transportation since enrolling at IUP in 2009.

For Samay, the snow is not a deterrent to his commuting. The campus, on the other hand, is.

By Abbey Zelko and Aleda Johnson

INDIANA -- On a summer evening in July 2004, John A. Minda visited his sick wife at Latrobe Hospital to show her his newly minted transient vendor license from the Indiana borough.

She took the license into her hand and smiled, Minda said.  A short time later, she fell asleep and never woke up.

By Colleen O'Laughlin

INDIANA  −  Late one night early in the spring semester of 2012, Walter F. Aguirre, 28, a senior marketing major at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, was hanging out with his Phi Kappa Psi fraternity brothers when he got a craving for tacos. 

He didn't want pizza. He didn't want convenience-store carry-out. He wanted the food he grew up eating in the Hispanic neighborhoods of Los Angeles, where street vendors are plentiful and popular.

His friends didn't understand his specific hunger. At first.

"None of them really understood what I meant by that," said Aguirre in a November interview. "Then one night, I made some at home for my wife and kids.  This idea just kept coming back to me."

By Emily Weber

INDIANA -- In the middle of a class discussion about socioeconomic status, Ignacio J. "Nacho" Alarcón, 20, a philosophy major in Indiana University of Pennsylvania's  Robert E. Cook Honors College, found himself a minority in more ways than one. When the professor asked the 20 students seated around the long table in Whitmyre Hall's ornate Painting Room to evaluate the diversity of their peers, many turned to look at Alarcón.

"I was one of a few men," Alarcón said in a Nov. 2 interview in Whitmyre. "And the only person who wasn't white."