When Sara Miller met with her academic advisor for the first time as a freshman at Northwest, she discovered she had a problem. She wanted to major in Education and minor in Missions, but that would take at least five years. And her parents would only pay for four.

“So I determined that I would finish in four years,” she states, “even though I had to take up to 21 credits in some semesters.”

By the time she was a senior – four years later – she’d fallen in love with the Pacific Northwest and planned to stay in the area to teach.

Her plan soon began to unravel.

“At Thanksgiving, I talked to my cousin in Brooklyn, and he suggested I read Savage Inequalities by Jonathan Kozol. This book reveals the often horrible state of the public schools that serve the inner city poor.”

Sara borrowed a copy from one of her professors. During finals week, already stressed by her academic load, she still read one chapter each night.

“As I read about the need, I’d fall to the floor, crying and praying for over an hour,” Sara states. “I was minoring in Missions, after all, and I could feel my heart turning to the inner city.”

In February, a friend told Sara about Teach for America, a program that sends graduates of top colleges into poor rural and urban schools.

In fact, Teach for America has the cachet the Peace Corps had for earlier generations. Last year, 12 percent of Yale’s graduates applied, as did 8 percent of Harvard’s and Princeton’s.

“It was President’s Day, so I didn’t have any classes. I went to the library, reworked my resume, wrote a letter of intent, and e-mailed my application. And I never told anyone about it.”

Teach for America receives thousands of applications each year and accepts only about a sixth of them. In 2003, Sara’s was one that they chose.

“On Good Friday, I got a packet saying that I’d be teaching in New York City, even though I’d requested cities on the West Coast,” she says. “And they wanted me to teach Math, even though my endorsement was in Social Studies. I’ve always been good at math, so I figured I could handle middle school math.”

The big question was whether she could handle middle school students.

“When I started, I was given two sixth-grade math classes,” Sara says. “The majority of my students were new immigrants who were learning English. It’s amazing how God had prepared me with my Missions minor. I’d taken Intercultural Communications at Northwest. I’d also taken Introduction to Teaching English as a Second Language. Only God would have known that those classes would be so important.”

For a woman who took 21 credits a semester as an undergraduate, one task, even the daunting task of teaching math in the Bronx, wasn’t enough.

Sara earned a Master’s Degree from Fordham University, in a program underwritten by Teach for America. And on her own, she studied Spanish at yet another college to communicate more fluently and teach more effectively.

It’s no surprise that Teach for America has asked Sara to help coordinate and advise their new appointees.

But above all, she savors the success she experiences in the classroom.

“The other day, I heard a mother tell her son how lucky he was to have Ms. Miller as a teacher,” Sara recalls.

“That’s exactly how I feel about the professors at Northwest who took a personal interest in preparing me.”