Education has always been at the core of Andrea Smith’s life.
A commander in the U.S. Coast Guard, Smith grew up in Albany, where her father, Anthony Parker, has served as president of Albany Technical College for the last quarter-century. When Smith received an appointment to the U.S. Coast Guard Academy after graduating from high school, it was her father who insisted she give it a try.
“I will be very honest,” says Smith, “it was not love at first sight. I had all these chips on my shoulder. And I told myself, ‘I’ll leave after this’ or ‘I’ll leave after that.’ Needless to say, I kept not leaving.”
After graduating from the academy in 2001 with a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering (the first African American female to do so), Smith began her first tour of duty and has been in the Coast Guard ever since. Her tenure has included service in New York City in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina devastated the area in 2005.
When Smith (MBA ’11) had the opportunity to return to the academy to teach, she was fulfilling a long-held dream to work in education. And she was on the receiving end of another opportunity, which brought her to the University of Georgia and the Terry College.
“The Coast Guard has this phenomenal opportunity where we send a good portion of our officers to graduate school for certain programs,” says Smith, who also earned a master’s degree in engineering management from the University of New Orleans when she was stationed there. “When I got selected to teach, the Coast Guard sent me to get an MBA and I came to Terry and then had a four-year stint teaching at the academy.”
Noting that the Coast Guard Academy is considerably different from a traditional college experience, Smith embraced campus life at UGA and the academic rigor she faced at Terry.
“It was a great experience,” she says. “I spent a lot of time on campus and got involved in different organizations. I went to football games, I traveled with classmates down to Jacksonville to see the Georgia-Florida game. I definitely used the opportunity to dive in, and that was so rewarding and so much fun. It was great and I thoroughly enjoyed it.”
Smith says the lessons she learned served her well as an academy instructor and afterward.
“I was going back to the academy to teach, so being able to use that education experience as a model for how I wanted to be as an instructor was super-helpful,” says Smith, whose Terry experience also included a summer internship in Boston. “I learned skills that I still use now, skills not in traditional military operations. Being part of the civilian workforce was new to me, but I learned a lot of those tenets at Terry and I’m grateful.”
Promoted to commander three years ago, Smith now works in Washington, D.C., as the executive officer of the Coast Guard’s Recruiting Command. She assents that it’s not easy to recruit in any military branch these days, but it’s even more trying in the time of COVID-19.
“It’s challenging because being a smaller service we have to work to make people understand who we are and are aware that the Coast Guard is a military option,” she says. “Getting in front of those individuals, especially in a COVID environment, is difficult but when we’re able to do that, luckily what we have to offer sells itself.
“It’s extremely challenging to find good, diverse, young, excited and talented applicants, but when you get in front of that group of people, the work is very recharging. If you’ve got to do a job that’s draining, having a job that also charges the battery is helpful.”