Fortune Mag offers advice on remaking yourself in the Motor City

In this city, it's not just old buildings that can get second chances. With Michigan's unemployment rate hovering around 13%, Fortune interviewed five Detroiters who turned their layoffs into new livelihoods, creating opportunities in new industries and as entrepreneurs. Lessons learned from the D? Read on.

Excerpt:

In Detroit you will find a guy who creates a new twist on the lemonade-out-of-lemons bromide: building furniture from the remains of demolished houses. Here you will discover laid-off corporate executives opening up companies on their own, and assembly-line workers going back to school for nursing credentials. Here you will find blue-collar and white-collar workers catching the green wave.

"This city is a blank slate," says Detroit's Nicole Rupersburg, 29, who relaunched herself as a culinary tour guide after being laid off. "It's not a world of wealth and prestige and structure," she says. "Detroit is what you make of it, and here you are what you make of yourself."

Read more here.
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