Real People Profiles: Carrie (Mann) Miller

Thu, 18 Nov 2010 10:00:00 -0500
real-people-profiles

I’m asking some of the people you might encounter on the UMBC campus, including students, faculty, staff and alumni, to answer a few questions about themselves and their experiences. These are their responses.

Name: Carrie (Mann) Miller

Hometown: Richmond, VA

Q: When did you attend UMBC?

A: 2003-2007.

Q:What are you doing now?

A: I am a Residential Life Coordinator at Ohio Wesleyan University outside of Columbus, OH. I oversee an all women's hall and nine theme houses, which we call Small Living Units (SLUs). I wear a lot of hats. On any given day I could be helping a student plan a house project, bring a speaker to campus, mediating a roommate conflict, making sure a broken heater gets fixed or meeting with one of my staff members.

Q: In 12 words or less, what role(s) do you play on campus?

A: I worked to make SGA more accessible to students.

Q: What aspect of your UMBC role(s) did/do you enjoy most?

A: I loved the feeling of possibility that SGA meetings and the energy in the Student Orgs held. The fact that we could discuss an idea in an SGA meeting and then bring that idea into being was incredible. I felt like nothing was impossible and more often than not nothing was. My time in SGA taught me to look for possibility not obstacles.

Q: What is the most important or memorable thing you learned in college?

A: It isn’t always where you are going but how you get there that matters. I am a planner, but after graduating I wasn’t sure what my plan was. The funny thing is that when I started thinking about the things I enjoyed or learned the most from, they have almost never been in my “plan”. If you focus too much on your destination you miss all the wonderful things along the way.

Q: Complete this sentence: "I am a big fan of __________"

A: Libraries! I love everything about libraries; it is an amazing feeling to have so much knowledge at your fingertips!

Q: Do you have any UMBC stories, little-known facts about UMBC, favorite spots on campus, or anything else you’d like to share?

A: I have lots of UMBC stories, but I think my favorite memory from my time at UMBC was the 40th Anniversary fireworks, which I watched from the roof of the Commons. I can’t disclose how I got up there, but it felt the perfect beginning of the end of my time at UMBC. I had given a Convocation speech that September welcoming the new students home, I had been inspired to write the speech by a number of different things that happened while I was a student but perhaps the foundation of the speech came from the feeling of home I always felt at the end of a long day when I would walk from my office in the student orgs space back to my Walker Ave apartment. I always felt like the campus was mine and mine alone when I would walk up the hill at sunset or after dark, I would almost always stop at the top of the hill before going into my apartment to look at the campus for a few seconds. The feeling I had in those few seconds everyday was in large part why I wrote that speech, which in all likelihood few students would remember now, but the idea of home grew into not just a welcome to our campus, but a reminder that success is self defined, that our value is not determined by our GPAs or titles on campus. For me being at home at UMBC was about being authentic and idea that grew out of my few seconds at the top of the hill everyday.