...Twenty-four-year-old soprano Meagan Miller, a winner in the recent Metropolitan Opera National Council Auditions, believes that no one should attend a conservatory such as Juilliard directly after high school, because eighteen-year-olds are too young to absorb what such schools have to offer. Miller, also the 1998 winner of the Joy in Singing Award and a current student at the Juilliard Opera Center, studied liberal arts -- with a concentration on English literature -- for two years at Washington and Lee University before taking the plunge into music. She recalls enacting scenes from Shakespeare in one class and analyzing poetry in another, where "we treated Emily Dickinson like our daily vitamins."...