Shawna Sinnott wakes up between 0430 and 0500 every weekday. The Harvard University senior rolls out of bed, passes the ballerina posters mounted on her wall and heads for her closet, fully stocked with ball gowns, bikinis and Marine Corps Dress Blues.
“It’s kind of funny the way it’s organized,” said Sinnott, a Marine-Option midshipman in the Navy Reserve Officer’s Training Corps (ROTC) as well as winner of the title “Miss Boston” in the 2007 Miss Massachusetts competition. “The left side is my uniforms—camo and dress blues and khakis, with evening gowns on the other side … Then on the floor there are the combat boots next to the leather boots and the pretty shoes.”
Sinnott, 21, leads a busy life, and that’s just how she likes it. She partook in pageants during her first two years of college, and after she finished competing in Miss Massachusetts in 2008, she packed up her bags and headed to the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center, where she spent ten days hiking and undergoing intensive outdoor survival training.
On occasion, she’d attend Marine Corps training before dawn and then swap her boots and camouflage gear for hairspray and makeup in preparation for a photo shoot. She has discovered many things over the years: that cutting your nails short preserves your manicure, that unwashed bun-hair can, in fact, look good on camera and that a white military uniform with a fake tan isn’t the most flattering combo.
Now Sinnott is wrapping up her senior year, and in addition to being Harvard’s lone “Understanding Terrorism” major (a program she created to investigate the environmental conditions that cause terrorism), she is also, according to the New York Times in 2009, one of more than 30,000 students nationwide receiving free college tuition in exchange for a commitment to serve in the military after graduation.
Sinnott has spent the past four years preparing for the obligatory four more years of active service to come. She trains with fellow future Marines at 5:30 a.m. three times a week, takes a Naval science course every semester, participates in a handful of Field Training Exercises each year (for which the conditioning includes a six-to-nine mile hike with a full pack) and spends two hours each Wednesday at a leadership lab. Even when she’s away from Harvard, there’s hardly such a thing as vacation; she has spent her summers driving submarines, flying in aircrafts of all sorts, undergoing survival training and shadowing Marines.
Yet while the training is intense and her days are packed, Sinnott loves the structure and has long had her eyes on a career as a Marine. After she graduates in May, she’ll undergo six months of training in Virginia and then get stationed with a unit. She is drawn to the idea of “flying multi-million-dollar fighter jets or leading men and women into battle” while her friends “will be sitting behind desks in typical nine-to-five jobs.”
“I have wanted to be a Marine since I was seven years old,” said the Boston native whose father is a Colonel in the Marine Corps Reserve. “I thought every other little girl wanted to be a Marine, too. But while my friends were playing with Barbies, I was the one in the backyard playing Marine.”
While Sinnott was drawn to the military culture—the discipline, the fitness and the intensity—from the beginning, University of Pennsylvania sophomore and Navy ROTC Midshipman Jess O’Shea would have laughed disbelievingly if someone had told her high school self that she’d be spending her college years in uniform. A self-described “shy, behind-the-scenes kind of girl” from Tampa, Florida, O’Shea had always wanted to be a doctor. She had no exposure to the military growing up, but come senior year, she randomly decided to do a summer program at the Naval Academy to add something to her résumé, and she ended up on a recruiter’s calling list.
“This guy, he called me all the time, and I could hardly understand him,” O’Shea said.
She applied for the ROTC scholarship and for admission to Penn, and when she got both, she figured she’d give the program a chance and drop it if she didn’t like it.
While the ten hours per week she spends training and doing ROTC certainly put her time management and stamina to the test, she has grown to love ROTC for the social network (most of her friends are in the program, a group of about 100 students from Penn, Drexel and Temple), the structure, the potentially free path to naval medical school and the opportunity to travel.
For Brenna Williams, a sophomore in Vanderbilt University’s Navy ROTC program, the 15-20 hours she spends doing ROTC training and activities each week is entirely justified by the fact that she’ll graduate without a single loan. She found out about the program from a mass e-mail from the Navy with the subject “win $180,000 for college.”
As captain of her high school’s cross-country team, Williams loved the idea of the team atmosphere the Navy would provide, though now she admits she felt slightly misled by recruiters’ claims that she would be able to have a completely normal undergraduate experience. “My life pretty much is ROTC,” she said.
Still, it has been important for her to spend time with her non-ROTC friends and Alpha Delta Pi sisters, even if it means showing up to chapter meetings in uniform.
“I needed that girliness,” said Williams, who lives with her sorority sisters and is obsessed with online shopping. “And I can definitely do the ‘girly girl thing,’ and I enjoy it, but it’s also cool to put on the uniform. I don’t have to think about what I wear on Thursdays.”
But after waking up for an 0600 workout on Thursday mornings and spending the afternoon in Navy class and Navy lab, Williams is always ready to change into a dress.
“I’ve looked like a man all day. I have to do something,” she said. “Everyone is really supportive and interested, but some of my best friends have definitely walked by me and not recognized me in uniform.”
She also says her long-distance boyfriend hates the idea of her going into the Navy, mostly because he thinks she should be the one following him.
The hardest part? “Knowing that I’ve limited my boyfriend and me to a long-distance relationship for at least the next six years,” Williams said. “The knowledge that I’ve committed myself until I’m 26,” She plans to serve her four years and then decide whether to stay in service or become a nurse practitioner.
If O’Shea decides to go to medical school through the Navy, she will be committing to ten years of service as a Navy physician, and while she knows it’s a big commitment, she’s OK with that.
“I want to be a doctor anyways,” she said. “Being a doctor in the Navy or being a doctor in the civilian world, it doesn’t really matter to me too much.”
Sinnott hopes to go into intelligence during her service and maybe go to law school down the line to pursue a career in government. And despite the fact that only about five percent of Marine officers are females, Sinnott, O’Shea and Williams have all found the military culture to be a very accepting, gender-equal one.
As for the pageants, Sinnott contends that they’re not all that different from the Marines.
“In both, you are judged on your poise, confidence, fitness and intelligence,” she said. “Many things are transferable, from answering questions under pressure to how to do your hair in a professional yet stylish bun.”
Name: Shawna Sinnott, Marine midshipman
College: Harvard University, class of 2010
Hometown: Boston, MA
Major: Understanding Terrorism; Minor: Celtic Languages and Literatures
Lover of: Rubik’s cubes, the New England Patriots, golf, pageants (she won the title of “Miss Boston” in the Miss Massachusetts competition in 2007)
What next? Maybe law school and a career in government
ROTC insight: “When you graduate, you will be flying multi-million dollar fighter jets or leading men and women in battle, while your friends will be sitting behind desks in typical 9 to 5 jobs. Serve your country, see the world and make an impact.”
Name: Brenna Williams, Navy midshipman
College: Vanderbilt University, class of 2012
Hometown: Sanibel Island, Florida Major: Human and Organizational Development
Lover of: Online shopping, books, beaches, Alpha Delta Pi
What next? Nursing school, a possible career as a nurse practitioner with a specialty in adolescent care
ROTC insight: “People don’t usually believe me when I tell them I’m in ROTC until they see me in my uniform. Whenever I get asked what I’m involved in on campus I always mention ROTC first because it’s usually a good conversation starter and people are always interested.”
Name: Jess O’Shea, Navy midshipman
College: University of Pennsylvania, class of 2012
Hometown: Tampa, FL
Major: Biology with a neurobiology concentration; Minor: Classics
Lover of: soccer, volunteering, neuroscience research What next? Med school (fingers crossed)
ROTC insight: “It really isn’t as daunting as I thought to be a girl. I thought it would be strange at first, being a girl in a sort of fraternity. But all the guys are my friends, and the girls are really close. I like being a girl in the military because we’re unique and we can do almost all the same things that guys can. My favorite part about being a girl is when you’re better than some of the guys at [physical training] or sports. That’s what I strive for.”