MPR hosts annual scholar competition
Minnesota Public Radio is looking for students to compete in their upcoming competition that sent a team of Bennies and Johnnies to the Capitol last year.
During the second annual “Voices for Impact” event, CSB+SJU students will come together in groups brainstorming creative problem- solving to answer the question: “How can MPR News become more relevant in helping college students make sense of their world?”
MPR, with the help of the McNeely Center for Entrepreneurship, created the design sprint to help students better understand how college students view public media and what publications can do to shape the future of public media.
The event will take place Oct. 22 from 4 to 6 p.m. in room 378 of the Dietrich Reinhart Learning Commons, located just off Alcuin. Every student who participates receives a $40 gift card to spend how they choose.
Barida Bijani, a professor of entrepreneurship and key organizer of the event, said it will give students the real experience they might be missing.
“We try to give students a sense for what the real world looks like and what sort of challenges that you end up facing,” Bijani said. “Once college students are out in the real world, it’s way less structured, it’s more about being self-starters and being creative in how you go about problem solving in general.”
Bijani said the event serves as a safe space for students to use their resourceful passion no matter what their major or minor is.
“It’s not about failing or succeeding,” Bijani said. “It’s about really tapping into your creative energies, there’s no such thing as a dumb idea and every idea is welcome in that context.”
Shannon Goergen, entrepreneurship professor and director of the McNeely Center for Entrepreneurship, said the event gives students the opportunity to take their ideas beyond just discussion.
“Not only do they get to voice their opinions, but they also get to create something through very hands-on and tangible, like real-life work application,” Goergen said.
Goergen said the event is also meant to bring together students from different backgrounds, allowing them to approach public media from different perspectives.
“It’s cross-disciplinary collaboration,” she said. “The workshop brings together students from journalism, business, environmental studies, computer science, every interest area.”
The design sprint continues a relationship between MPR and CSB+SJU that began before this event, with the founder being SJU alum William Hugh Kling.
In Nov. 2025, approximately 50 members of MPR’s leadership team visited St. John’s, where they explored the Donald McNeely Center for Entrepreneurship and spoke with students about the future of public media, according to a CSB+SJU news release from Nov. 11, 2025.
“MPR wants to keep engaging our students. They still value where our students stand on these sorts of issues,” Bijani said. “This design sprint happens to be a good way of keeping that relationship going.”
Last year, CSB+SJU students who participated in the event advanced to the finalist stage, giving them the opportunity to work directly with MPR and American Public Media. Goergen said the students had a meaningful experience having their ideas heard by professionals in the media industry.
“The students that ended up being finalists from CSB+SJU just had a really amazing experience being able to interact with folks from MPR and American Public Media and have their voices heard in a way that they wouldn’t otherwise be able to have experienced,” Goergen said.
This year, MPR will again select two ideas from CSB+SJU to continue developing. The selected students will work with professional mentors over several weeks to turn their ideas into formal pitches.
“Every college student has to engage with media, whether it’s social media or public media or whatever it might be,” Barida said. “We found last year that all the teams contributed really, really interesting solutions.”
