MHCC SPOTLIGHT: LOUDEN MILLER A STUDENT OF MANY TALENTS

Photos Provided By Louden Miller

The world is full of accomplished and ambitious young people. Alexander the Great became king of Macedon at 20 years old, Michael Phelps swam his first Olympic race at age 15, and Sergey Karjakin became the world’s youngest chess grandmaster at 12, just to name a few overachievers.

Perhaps it is an overstatement to compare Louden Miller to those young achievers, but being a college student here at MHCC at 16 years old, he has accomplished more than most of us had when we were his age. Raised in a household very conducive for academic rigor, he grew up being a very gregarious child, but possessed an academic maturity that outpaced many of his peers.

“I was a very social kid and I knew a lot but I had trouble communicating the importance of those issues because my peers didn’t see the extent of how important those topics could be,” Miller says now. Having trouble being able to share those thoughts, he ended up wanting to see himself improve by joining speech and debate competition – which would eventually lead him to become a prominent member of MHCC’s speech and debate team (Forensics).

Inspired by his father’s background as a coach and wanting to take advantage of his extroversion, Miller dedicated himself to the craft. He has already achieved much both for the Saints forensics team, where he successfully advocated for further program funding, and for his personal and professional life.

Specifically, the first-year Mt. Hood student has developed an expertise in the topic of bees, focusing most on the issue of colony collapse disorder, which he has discussed in After-Dinner Speaking matchups.

Louden Miller And A Bee Colony

Miller also chose to emphasize his interest in impromptu speaking because of his sociable personality, which enables him to converse on unexpected topics in his personal life, he said. He also favors IDPA debates (formal one-on-one debates under International Public Debate Association guidelines), “where they give you five topics to debate in the simplest way possible,” he said – a fondness likely attributable to his past difficulty getting points across to his contemporaries..

It’s been a successful run: He has earned a gold (medal) in After-Dinner Speaking – addressing a serious topic, with some humor mixed in – plus a bronze and other high scores in speaking categories during this debate season.

Just as speech and debate has prepared him to communicate in his personal life, Miller knows it will help him in his professional life, too. He hopes to pursue a career in epidemiology, where he aspires to work for the federal CDC in order to fix future public health issues.

“Communication is very important in epidemiology because you may have to talk to multiple people of a variety of backgrounds,” he said. “That’s how Forensics benefitted me.”

Despite his achievements, Miller remains humble, noting that his younger siblings have scored particularly high on their tests and he imagines that they will achieve as much as he has. For him, learning and serving is the point, not personal glory.

“I love to see myself grow,” he said. “I’m not interested in self-fulfillment but instead, I’m more interested in seeing how I can be of service to the people around me.”

1 Comments

  1. I like your style of looking at only positive attributes of the people in the article.

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