By Rachel Muir
Holly Harrison has led patrols off the coast of Africa and in the Middle East. She was the first woman to command a Coast Guard vessel during combat operations. And she’s often been the only woman stationed on a boat with more than a dozen men.
All in all, she’s spent eight of the last 15 years in military service at sea.
In August, though, she’ll “hang up her uniform for a year” to serve as a White House fellow.
The White House Fellowship program was created by President Johnson in 1965. Each year, about a dozen fellows — chosen through an intense interview process from hundreds of applicants across the nation — work with senior White House staff, cabinet secretaries and other top-ranking government officials.
Ms. Harrison, who holds the rank of lieutenant commander in the Coast Guard, was recently selected as one of 13 fellows for 2010-11. The program has a reputation for being rigorous and holding fellows to high standards.
That shouldn’t be a problem for Ms. Harrison.
Ms. Harrison graduated from the Coast Guard Academy in 1995 and headed to sea. “I didn’t want to sit behind a desk,” she says. She’s been stationed across the U.S., from Alaska to Hawaii, Washington, D.C., and Charleston, S.C., and in Manama, Bahrain.
The U.S. Coast Guard was established in 1790 and counts nearly 42,000 men and women among its active duty ranks.
“Every day we do something that directly affects the safety and security of the country,” says Ms. Harrison. That work includes responding to distress calls, performing operations to secure the nation’s ports, searching for and interdicting drug smugglers and boarding a variety of vessels to check safety equipment.
“It’s demanding work but very satisfying,” she says.
She’s often the only woman on a boat with as many as 20 men, something that doesn’t faze her — or the men she works with. “When it comes down to it, it’s just about doing your job,” she says.
Ms. Harrison’s most challenging assignment came in 2003 when she commanded a patrol boat during the opening phase of the war in Iraq.
“I had to make tough decisions on the spot because I typically didn’t have the ability to check in with my chain of command,” she says. Decisions like whether to open fire on a fast-moving, unidentified craft moving down the river toward your ship at night.
In the course of her six months in Iraq, her boat encountered and boarded numerous vessels of varying nationalities to ensure no prohibited personnel, weapons or contraband were smuggled in or out of Iraq. Ms. Harrison and her crew swept numerous shipwrecked vessels to remove insurgents spying on U.S. and coalition forces. They defended coalition assets and Iraqi oil terminals from insurgents and Iranian Republican Guard members, and they guarded minesweepers as they cleared mines from waterways.
“It was one of the most difficult and dangerous assignments, but it also caused my crew and I to bond in a way that I don’t think can be replicated anywhere else,” she says. “We had to rely on each other because that’s all we had.”
Her service and leadership earned her the Armed Forces’ Bronze Star, making her the first woman in the Coast Guard to receive the medal.
Military service runs in her family. Her father flew fighter jets for the Marines. She went to high school in suburban Washington and still serves with Fairfax County Fire and Rescue when stationed locally. In 2000, she was named Vienna, Va., firefighter and volunteer of the year.
Ms. Harrison also earned a master’s degree in public policy from Princeton University. And this spring she received her Master of Educational Technology Leadership from GW’s Graduate School of Education and Human Development.
She chose GW’s Education Technology Leadership program, which is entirely online, because it gave her the flexibility she needed with her Coast Guard duties, and gave her expertise for what she believes is an emerging and valuable educational tool.
“I’ve been to many remote locations around the world that lack access to information and a quality education, yet a well-designed educational program delivered via a simple computer with Internet connectivity can erase that barrier,” she says. Ms. Harrison completed most of her coursework from sea.
“It was hard sometimes,” she says. “Internet connections with the satellites from out at sea can be unpredictable as the ship moves and there’s limited bandwidth. I often had to study in the middle of the night when the connection was faster because fewer people were using it.” But she was able to pull it off — graduating this spring summa cum laude.
After six years taking classes online, she met most of her classmates in person for the first time at Commencement earlier this year. “We all sat together because though it was the first time meeting most face-to-face, we had already established strong friendships through the program,” she says. “It was amazing.”
There’s no doubt in her mind that she’ll apply her experience behind the scenes in the executive branch to her work in the Coast Guard. She looks forward to getting “back to the sea” when she completes her fellowship.
“I want to pay this opportunity forward by sharing the lessons I learn from this unique and invaluable experience.”