(WGHP) -- If you go to the right school, there are times when the people who stand at the front of the class can change your life. For Ross Harris, who grew up in Greensboro, it came as she was looking at her final years in Durham. “One of my professors at Duke ... was a visiting professor. His name was Saul Friedman,” Harris said. “He was a reporter for the Knight Ridder newspapers, and there was a course I took called Working with the Media about how to write for the media, and so he was one of the professors along with David Broder from the Washington Post. I got to know these guys ... For my program at Duke, Public Policy, we had a summer internship in Washington. A lot of people chose health policy. I chose communications policy. I really wanted to work at the White House. I just thought, what a great thing.” It's not an easy gig to get. Contacts made the difference. “Saul knew a woman named Patricia Barrio, who was from Michigan, and she was one of Jody's deputy press secretaries,” she said, referring to Carter Administration advisor and press secretary, Jody Powell. “Saul called her and said, ‘I've got this kid who wants an intern at the White House. Will you take her?’ And she said, ‘Sure, I'll take her.’” That gave Harris access to nearly everything going on in the White House while she was barely old enough to buy a drink. She went back to Duke to finish graduate school and was able to get a job with Chicago’s legendary advertising agency Leo Burnett. She’d been there barely eight weeks when serendipity smiled upon her one more time. “I was watching the Democratic convention and seeing my friends there that I'd worked with in Washington just thinking how great that was when the phone rings,” Harris said. “It's Linda Peek. Linda had been one of the associate press secretaries in the White House, and I'd worked with her. And she was the campaign press secretary [for Carter’s re-election campaign in 1980]. She says, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I'm actually watching the convention.’ She says, ‘Well, you have to come back and join the campaign.’ And I said, ‘Linda, I can't. I've got a real job. My parents would kill me.” Her parents were prominent in Democratic Party circles in and around Greensboro. Her mother grew up with childhood friends like former state government official Skipper Bowles and legendary Congressman Richardson Preyer, and that’s why the entire Harris family would spend election nights at the courthouse, watching results come in. But Harris didn’t want to be a politician herself, heeding the advice of people she respected. “They said, ‘Ross, you have a choice to make: you can choose to have the seat or the Rolodex,’ meaning you can be the candidate or you can do everything else. And for me, like the book 'Boys on the Bus,' the most fun place to be in a campaign is on the bus," she said. That was the idea of the job at Leo Burnett: she would work in political messaging and advertising. But soon after she got that call from Peek, she was called into one of the corner offices at Leo Burnett. “I think you ought to take that job,” the boss said. “I'll keep your job open here. I'll pay your health insurance. If Carter wins, you'll probably go to the White House, and you should do that. But if Carter loses, you'll come back to me. So I think either way, we win.” Ross took that job with the Carter campaign ... Although he lost that election to Ronald Reagan, Harris cherishes her time in the White House and with the campaign. As much as she admired Carter, she sees with hindsight that his skillset may not have been best suited for the job. “He was an engineer. He couldn't see the forest for the trees. He focused on that detail. It tripped him up many, many times. But he was honest. He was decent,” she said. “[His White House] was a happy place to work." See more from Harris’ time with Carter in this edition of The Buckley Report.