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For Ashwin Madia, change would seem synonymous with challenge. The son of Indian immigrants, Madia was student body president at the University of Minnesota and earned a law degree from New York University. He joined the U.S. Marine Corps and graduated from officers’ training school, then served as a Marine lawyer in several postings, including Iraq, before returning to Minneapolis to work at a law firm. Oh, and then he sought and won the DFL endorsement for Congress in Minnesota’s historically Republican Third District and ran an aggressive, albeit ultimately losing, campaign that was one of the most hotly contested in the nation. And he is barely thirty.

“I thought I could make a positive difference and do a good job,” Madia says of his improbable run for Congress. “I just figured whether I won or not, we’d help change the debate a bit, so I decided to go for it.”

Still, seeking your class presidency is one thing and running for Congress is quite another, requiring a certain amount of chutzpah. “I wasn’t lacking in confidence before I joined the Marine Corps,” he says, “but I had never held a weapon, had never even been camping until then. One of the reasons I joined the Marines was that I felt it would give me a new kind of confidence.”

Madia, who describes himself currently as “between jobs,” says he’s not certain what’s next besides resuming his law practice. He says that while he has no specific plans in the public sector, he’s looking for another way to serve—to “hopefully make a change for the better.”