Logic and passion are not synonymous, but it was a series of logical decisions that led Drew Miller to discover and chase his passion of helping the disenfranchised.
Miller will graduate May 7 from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a bachelor’s degree and a clear career path that he found in the classrooms of UNL and Lincoln’s refugee community.
When Miller was a senior at Lincoln Pius X High School, he didn’t put much stock in choosing a school to pursue his undergraduate studies, mostly because he wasn’t looking for anything specific.
“I didn’t think it would be prudent of me to pay a lot of money to go to a college outside of Nebraska if I didn’t know what I wanted to do yet,” he said.
So, Miller made a logical financial decision — attend UNL.
“It’s a good university and it’s prestigious, but it’s also affordable,” he said.
Miller took core requirement classes his first semester, still looking for his niche. He was also a typical college student — broke and in need of a job — and eventually started working 10 hours a week at Catholic Social Services, doing things like taking refugee families to buy groceries or driving them to the health department.
“I instantly fell in love with serving the people I was serving,” Miller said. “I became aware that my future career had to be human-oriented. It had to involve interacting with individuals.”
Miller wanted it to be a full-time gig, so he arranged all of his classes for later in the day and spent mornings as a case manager for refugee families. Since the 1980s, Lincoln has resettled thousands of refugees from around the world, including Afghanistan, Vietnam, Bosnia, Sudan, Iraq and many other countries.
Miller also found majors — political science, global studies — and professors that helped him understand his passion from a practical and cultural standpoint.
Miller said the hostility toward refugees was palpable after the terrorist attacks in Paris in November, and he and others who worked with refugees worked to educate people about the resettlement process while also meeting with state senators about pulling a bill that would have all but ended refugee resettlement in Nebraska.
Miller said he often pulled from lessons he learned about the pragmatic leadership of Abraham Lincoln from Ken Winkle, UNL professor of history, or about the legalities involved with human rights issues from UNL political scientist Courtney Hillebrecht.
He also founded Lincoln Friends of Refugees in 2013, where pairs of students work teach refugee families the English language. It was modeled after TeamMates, former football coach and athletic director Tom Osborne’s mentoring program, with a commitment of one hour per week for the three months that the family was being managed by Catholic Social Services. It quickly took off; Miller plans to expand the program with the help of UNL faculty to serve more families after he graduates.
“The volunteers have helped them purchase cars or helped their children apply for college, and they truly do form close friendships, though there’s a language barrier,” Miller said. “In my experience, there’s no barrier to friendship. These kids don’t speak a lick of Arabic and the refugees don’t speak English, but yet they’re able to form these really close friendships.”
Miller has earned an international fellowship to study human rights issues at the Vaclav Havel Library in Prague, where he will travel in June.
Miller has no plans to leave Lincoln permanently, especially because the refugee population continues to grow as global terrorism and violent regimes continue. His faith, education and personal experiences have cemented this work as his calling.
“It’s so emotionally taxing. We live in a very broken world,” he said. “To reconcile that, I really have to look at it as, ‘How am I changing this individual’s life today? How am I making him or her see tomorrow as a brighter future?’ For me, that makes it worth it.
“They share very sad stories, or horrific and deplorable situations, but at the end of the day, we are able to laugh together because they are here and they have been saved.”
