James Eadie is a jack-of-all-trades.
Bachelor’s degree in bioengineering from the University of Michigan, medical degree from Harvard, two tours in Iraq with the Air Force as a physician in a trauma center, and now he’s graduating with an Executive Master’s of Business Administration (MBA) degree from the McCombs School of Business.
But for Eadie, who is joining life-science venture capital firm Santé Ventures after graduation, those paths aren’t so disparate.
“Hopefully as time goes on I’ll bring in the perspective of having practiced medicine for 10 years, having run and started a business and now the knowledge I have from my formal business education,” Eadie said.
He’s clearly capable of balancing a full plate. While a student, Eadie kept busy running a medical practice with his wife, teaching resident physicians in San Antonio the business basics of owning a practice and spending weeks in the neonatal intensive care unit with his premature second son, Dylan. Dylan is doing just fine now, and Eadie has valuable lessons to take with him.
“The real-world challenges of being a small business owner during the economic crisis melded tremendously with the theoretical and technical skills I was learning through the MBA curriculum,” Eadie said.
“School has taken a blank wall and put a lot of windows and doors in it. I can see out. I can open doors,” he said. “And I can now begin to venture through these doors into areas that I couldn’t have before because I didn’t know they existed.”
