Daniel Miller visited with two of Tim Perry’s classes at Seymour High School on Oct. 10.
Daniel Miller was there, too.
Wait, what?
This was the second time Daniel Miller the news anchor visited with Perry’s classes. The last time was September 2013 when the other Daniel Miller was a junior at SHS.
“He was watching the news. He’s like, ‘I heard Daniel Miller on the news.’ He about freaked out,” Miller, the former SHS student, said of Perry. “Then he realized it was a news anchor, and then he’s like, ‘I have to email him. What a crazy happenstance.’”
Miller, who at the time was a news anchor for WISH-TV in Indianapolis, agreed to come to SHS to talk to Perry’s students, and while there, he took a photo with the other Daniel Miller and posted it on Twitter. Later on, Perry and his students took a field trip to watch Miller on a Saturday evening broadcast.
Ten years later, Miller, now a news anchor for FOX59 News in Indianapolis, was invited back to SHS.
“You never know,” he said when asked if he ever thought he’d be back 10 years later. “I didn’t think I would ever be back in Indiana. I just moved back three years ago. But (Perry) reached out to me and said, ‘Hey, come back.’ I was like, ‘OK, I’ll come back.’”
He, however, didn’t know his younger namesake would be there.
“I did not know you would be here today,” the news anchor said to the other Miller shortly after walking into the classroom.
“Surprise!” the younger Miller said.
The Millers had an opportunity to speak to students in Perry’s dual credit advanced speech and communication class and English 10 class, eating lunch with Perry in between. The news anchor mainly talked about his job, while the SHS grad talked about living and working in Indianapolis.
Miller said he has been in the news business for 20 years. He started writing for a newspaper in his hometown, Greensboro, North Carolina, and then worked on the assignment desk and served as an associate producer for a TV station in college.
Later on, he worked for stations in Tennessee, Indianapolis and Boston, Massachusetts. He was a producer and writer and worked in production before switching to news anchor.
“I’ve had a love for this, just wanting to be in front of the action, getting information for myself and doing my best to regurgitate it and report it,” he said. “You’ve got to love it.”
After graduating from SHS in 2015, the younger Daniel Miller said his family was all about him going to college to earn a higher education degree and get a good job, so he chose to go to a trade school, Lincoln Tech, in Indianapolis.
“I used the degree to get into a lot of jobs but not careers,” he said. “But with all of that experience, that kind of opened the footway for me to get into deeper troubleshooting maintenance technician jobs.”
For nearly four years, he has worked as a maintenance tech at Clif Bar Baking Co. in Indianapolis, which is around the corner from Lincoln Tech.
“I just fix multi-million-dollar robots and whatnot all day,” he said.
While he likes his job, Miller told the SHS students he was an average student in school and encouraged them to have a different outlook than he did.
“I just tried to get through high school as quick as possible and start working, which is a mistake. Don’t do that,” he told them. “It took me a lot of time to rebuild where I’m at now. I went from jumping around jobs and whatnot, just jumping into a trade school to say I’ve got education to keep running. I didn’t truly find what I wanted to do or where I actually planted my footing until I got into manufacturing maintenance millwork technician kind of work.”
Even though he said he’s still somewhat behind, he is on track to buy a home next year if the market stays where it’s at now, and he will have it paid off by the time he’s ready to retire in his 50s.
“Just make sure you pay attention and focus and figure out what you want to do so you’re not wasting as much time as I did so you don’t get as far behind as I am because you’re nothing but fighting and working all the time,” he told the SHS students.
Perry told him he turned a job into a career, so that’s a positive.
Miller the news anchor said his job is usually hectic because there’s always a lot happening in the world, like now with the Israel-Hamas war.
While that’s tumultuous and sad, he offered some positive advice to the students.
“As students and human beings, when you go out into the real world, all of these things are going to become part of your daily life about how you function as a person, where you work, where you live and how you care as an individual about your family and about yourself,” he said. “My message when I go anywhere is to always be a good human being first because you don’t realize the things that are developing in the world thousands of miles away.”