A love of children and a passion for social issues drive Wichita State University sophomore Terecia Miller to impact the lives around her.

Miller works on and off campus to teach others music. She came to WSU because of the special music education program with Elaine Bernstorf, associate dean and professor in the College of Fine Arts.

Miller caught Bernstorf’s attention at a Presidential Scholar’s dinner.

“Right then I realized that (Miller) had the perfect personality for teaching, and I wanted to work with her in music education,” Bernstorf said.

“I’ve always known I wanted to work with kids, to help kids,” Miller said. “I enjoy the innocence and the humor that they naturally bring.”

She said her 7-year-old brother, Corbin, is her “favorite person in the world.”

Miller is majoring in special music education to include special needs students in her future classrooms.

For a long time she thought about social work or family or school counseling, but she has been passionate about music since the womb, she said.

“My parents did the whole earphones on the belly thing,” she said.

Her prenatal soundtrack included Mozart, the Eagles and Styx, among others.

From the time she could walk, Miller would stand on a stool in the middle of her grandmother’s living room and sing into a plastic banana.

And from fifth grade to her senior year of high school, she played her father’s saxophone, which her uncle played and her younger cousin uses now.

She said music was an obvious choice and she should have picked it long ago.

Miller volunteered at Mead Middle School in Wichita and taught music to a “rough, tough, inner-city kid” who had no desire to be in school. He just wanted to play basketball. A year-and-a-half later, she ran into him and he’s excited about going to college.

Children have so much potential, she said, you cannot tell them, “You’re not that good; you should give up," she said. “They can change anything, do anything."

Good music teachers are needed in Wichita, she said, but with school boards across the nation cutting arts education out of schools, she’ll likely move to a district with more opportunities.

Miller teaches a music class at the Cerebral Palsy Research Foundation for adults with special needs. She said the class is not about performance but about feeling the music and being able to emote through music.

“I’m glad that I’ve had (the) opportunity,” she said, “learning to work with students of different abilities.”

Along with a passion for music and teaching, Miller is involved in civil rights and social issues. She is the social justice chair for That Gay Group!, dealing with such events as the AIDS Walk and Hate Closet.

As a senator at large for the Student Government Association, she is active in the movement to include sexual orientation on USD 259’s notice of nondiscrimination clause and bullying policy.

She also works at the Center for Student Leadership on campus and is a member of Gamma Phi Beta with two positions within the sorority.

“I was the girl who was never going to go Greek,” she said. “It’s so close to my heart now.”

Miller is involved in two WSU choirs: a capella and chamber chorale.

She will travel to Carnegie Hall this summer with 80 other WSU students to perform a requiem by David Childs. The WSU choir will be the first to sing the requiem, which is still being written.

Also, for the first time, the WSU chamber’s choir has been chosen to perform at the Kansas Music Educators Association conference. It’s the only WSU choir to audition and be chosen, but many schools will be performing from grade school to the university level.

But Miller’s ultimate goal is to be a teacher, a good one.

“That’s really all there is to it,” she said.

To her, a good teacher can communicate with her students and get results out of them. She said they don’t have to be the best choir, but they need to appreciate their accomplishments.

Miller said she wants to be a teacher they can count on to build them up.