Adam Baldwin

Texas A&M, Mays Business School

“An innovative, driven, charismatic, and sharp individual who sets high standards and consistently achieves them.”

Hometown: Flower Mound, TX

Fun fact about yourself: In 2022, I had hip reconstructive surgery from my time as a collegiate athlete that required over a year of recovery, during which I had to learn how to walk again. I have since ran five-minute miles, ran 5ks and 10ks, played soccer weekly, and I am looking to do a half marathon this year.

Undergraduate School and Degree:

University of Colorado – Colorado Springs, B.S. in Business with a dual concentration in Finance and International Business and a minor in Economics.

I was also the captain of the University’s Men’s Soccer Program.

Where was the last place you worked before enrolling in business school? MetLife, Inc. (Cary, NC). I was a summer analyst on MetLife’s Global Procurement team. I had the opportunity to lead initiatives within savings governance, vendor consolidation, and supplier sustainability. My contributions resulted building a governance platform that resulted in over $20 million in validated savings and influencing 2025 company-wide sustainability goals.

Where did you intern during the summer of 2024? Chevron (Houston, TX). I was a member of the Supply Chain Management Development Program. I worked as an internal consultant for Chevron’s global supply chain function, developing and implementing an evaluation process to assess the value of Chevron’s key supplier relationships to ensure effective resource optimization.

Where will you be working after graduation? I am currently pursuing a law degree, as my graduate school aspiration has been to complete my JD/MBA. I have always been interested in negotiating contracts, which has motivated this unique career path to better understand the overlap between law and business. As such, in this summer of 2025, I will be working closely with M&A and other transactional law attorneys at Vinson & Elkins, one of Texas’ leading law firms.

Which academic or extracurricular achievement are you most proud of during business school?  During the MBA program, I had the opportunity to consult for a medical device startup seeking a valuation and business plan for a market disrupting device that helps solve the difficulty in detecting aspiration dysphagia (referring to difficulty swallowing that leads to food “going down the wrong tube” and contributes to Pneumonia). Through this experience, I lead a group of four other MBA peers for seven months as we prepared a comprehensive business plan. It included financial forecasts with sensitivity analysis, market segmentation analysis, a risk register, FDA clearance pathways, and exit strategy recommendations. Throughout this process, we saw the full scope of the products impact in real time. Our team was able to meet with various parties such as the patient with whom this product was inspired and leading ENT specialists who would implement this technology in their practice. We even presented this venture to a former CEO of Mayo Clinic. Furthermore, being able to bring different perspective together, navigate team dynamics, and deliver a business plan and presentation to the founders, team, and MBA program office was truly a highlight of this program.

What achievement are you most proud of in your profession career? My proudest achievement was the final project I delivered last summer with Chevron during my MBA internship. In nine-and-a-half weeks (shortened because I started law school), I created and implemented a system for global category managers in supply chain to routinely evaluate their engagements with their key suppliers. That way, they could provide greater visibility as to the value of such relationships and ensure they were aligned with company’s goal of optimizing resources.

What made this my proudest accomplishment were the obstacles that I overcame to be successful. Where others had projects analyzing data and market conditions based on information readily available in databases, my access to information was limited to the different category manager’s personal experiences; some of whom were busy with their own projects, enjoying summer vacations, prone to anchoring, or not warm to the idea of challenging the status quo. Further, it was a project which the company had been looking to implement for many years but had continued to fall through.

My obstacles included shortened timelines, an exhaustive supplier management framework, initial lack of buy in from category managers, and coordinating and leading over 10 different value assessment workshops consisting of different teams and level of seniority. Despite this, I delivered a system and recommendations for over +50 key suppliers which the company is currently using to manage their resources more effectively. Through this project, I explored the company’s full value chain from putting rigs in the ocean to the suppliers that are helping finance these operations. Finally, this experience highlighted my resilience to adversity, flexibility through change, ability to learn and implement quickly, and deliver effectiveness high quality products despite tight deadlines. For these reasons, it is my proudest career achievement thus far.

Why did you choose this business school? When I was making my MBA decision, I was looking for a program where I felt my contributions would be valued, where I would get personalized attention to my career aspirations, and tap into a strong alumni network that I could leverage throughout my professional career. As a JD/MBA co-op, I have a unique professional journey, and it was at A&M that I found a place that overall resources that allowed me further my personal and professional interests; A main one being the opportunity to better craft my personal brand as I walk the path between law and business.

Who was your favorite MBA professor? My favorite professor was Dr. Jerry Strawser. He taught managerial accounting, a class that that on paper has the potential to lack student engagement, but he made it a pleasant and interactive environment. Classes, which always started with an 80’s song, were filled with “bad” accounting dad jokes (unfortunately I laughed at them all). They included case studies that fostered dynamic classroom discussions and provided real world applications where we would apply our tools to projects based on current company financial statements or explore how class concepts have been translated into current events from earnings calls.

In fact, even after leaving the program, Dr. Strawser still sends out a newsletter style email about what’s going on in the news. Overall, he is a brilliant professor, cares about his student’s success, and balances work and play to create an enjoyable yet academic environment. More than that, he equipped us with real world technical skills, not just accounting in a vacuum. I am grateful I had the opportunity to be in his class.

What was your favorite course as an MBA? My favorite course was a negotiation course taught by Dr. Bridgette Chambers. In this course, we got hands-on experience working on our negotiation tool kit in various settings. In my favorite experience, I had the opportunity to lead a negotiation with our professor and her private equity investor for the acquisition of a mock company. With a team of six, we planned our strategy, calculated our valuation based on enterprise value multiples, pitched to the investors, negotiated in multiple rounds, and adjusted to expert tactics used against us.

While other groups caved to the pressure of the accomplished sharks with billion-dollar deal portfolios, we stuck to our strategy and refused to take a valuation that did not align with our bargaining range. While it would have been satisfying to have closed the deal, both our professor and the investor were impressed with our negotiation and commended us for not taking their offer. “Some of the best negotiation decisions I’ve made were knowing when to walk away” is a quote from the class I will always remember.

What was your favorite MBA event or tradition at your business school? My favorite tradition in the MBA program is “Good Bull.” Every month the program had a tradition of recognizing good deeds or accomplishments of others, which were called “Good Bull.” In concluding our MBA monthly meetings to discuss various administrative topics, the floor would be opened up for “Good Bull” from the prior month. For example, I nominated a classmate for helping another classmate move into their apartment over the summer. I enjoyed this event because it was a great way to learn more about my peers’ accomplishments, highlight good deeds, and encourage us to find opportunities to help one another.

Looking back over your MBA experience, what is the one thing you’d do differently and why? Looking back, I wish I had the opportunity to focused less on grades and more emphasis on the overall experience of business school: networking, diving into different career interests with others, attending conferences with different school, and creating programs that would be passed down to future MBA candidates. Unfortunately, due to being in an accelerated program where I took extra course work to finish an 18-month program in 12 months, there were limited opportunities to go above-and-beyond in that regards while staying on top of my course work.

I have always believed that business is about developing connections. Whether its building clients or interviewing employees, people want to work with the people they enjoy. Business school is a great opportunity to foster those connections because you never know who will call you when looking for a new C-suite, investor, advocate, keynote speaker, or any other opportunity based on relationships you fostered during the MBA program.

What did you love most about your business school’s town? Baseball games! One of the best experiences was going to watch A&M Baseball on sunny Saturday afternoons as they played in the national tournament. Immaculate vibes and great players.

What movie or television show best reflects the realities of business and what did you learn from it? In my opinion, Moneyball is the best reflection of business. This movie is about the Oakland A’s, a professional baseball team, that turned their season around by implementing data analytics into how they recruited their players, despite having a small budget. While the Yankees were looking for all star players who were the all-around package, the A’s relied on individual statics like a player’s on-base percentage, which allowed them to recruit unorthodox and overlooked players who could be signed within their budget. With this innovative system they turned a team from near last in the league to one at the top of the tables.

This is a great reflection of business for a number of reasons. First, it highlights that businesses are about tradeoffs (budgets, time, effort, and other resources) in which decision-makers have to determine a strategy that fits their company’s needs. Second, it reflects the difficulty of change. When implementing this new system, the general manager was considered crazy and lost many staff members…until it started working. Just like business, every market disrupting idea is often “dumb”… until it works. To be successful you have to unite people around a common goal, which was buying into data analytics, and stay true to that vision despite the critics. Finally, the movie highlights valuing individuality and using talent effectively. Each player was specifically good at a unique thing, but did not have the complete package. However, like business if you can facilitate an environment that empowers each individual to be at their best, the whole company succeeds. For these reasons, I believe Moneyball is a great reflection of business.

What is one way that your business school has integrated AI into your programming? What insights did you gain from using AI? A unique way which A&M integrated AI was in a class about managing talent within a business. The course included themes like implementing a talent management program, how to distinguish talent amongst high performing employees, and how to motivate talent.

In this class one of our final projects involved using AI to implement a series of prompts to create a hypothetical company with various employees and a failing talent management system in place. However, the generated talent management process allowed students to write an analysis about the company and how it should be properly managed based on the material applied from class. From this course, we got heavy exposure into prompt engineering and refining prompts that added parameters and produced optimal results. In a broader scale, it gave students the familiarity to use AI in broader capacities because we are more familiar with the structure and formula for creating the prompts that will yield the most effective responses. 

Which MBA classmate do you most admire? Kaylee Baron. She is truly the most brilliant, incredible, hardworking classmate that I had the pleasure of working with. She is someone who strives for perfection in everything she does and it showed, as she was one of two people to graduate the program with a 4.0 GPA. She is also one of the most compassionate people in the program. The MBA, as most know, is largely a team sport. Being a JD/MBA co-op student who was taking extra classes, I appreciated how there were group assignments where she offered to take on a greater share of the workload to allow me to put more time into other responsibilities. She is the embodiment of what a great boss or teammate looks like. She is someone who you want to have behind you. She wants to see you succeed and is willing to be in the trenches with you to help achieve it. She is truly an asset in everything she does, and I greatly admire her.

What are the top two items on your professional bucket list? The two main items on my professional bucket list are that, first, I want to negotiate over one billion dollars in enterprise value based on acquisitions, strategic alliances, cost saving initiatives, or other forms of value creation. I also would like to take a job assignment outside of the country for at least a month or have the opportunity travel to multiple continents as part of my work.

What made Adam such an invaluable addition to the Class of 2025?

“Adam truly embodies the core values of Texas A&M University and the Mays MBA program. While he was an outstanding student (myself and many of my faculty colleagues would tell you that he was one of the top students in our classes), Adam is far more than that. He is also an outstanding classmate, friend, confidant, and mentor who cares about his peers. Adam counsels them, learns from them, and celebrates their successes with them.

Adam was enrolled in one of our niche programs, one in which students complete a full MBA program in a single year and then pursue another post-baccalaureate degree. Adam is currently enrolled in law school at the University of Texas at Austin, a highly-ranked school (ranked 16th overall and 5th among public institutions by U.S. News & World Report). His academic performance is even more noteworthy, given that the accelerated nature of his program required him to carry an additional courseload. In addition to assuming this courseload with distinction, he was heavily engaged in the program and brought significant energy and passion to every class. In my Financial Accounting class, Adam served as one of my “go-to” students to begin a discussion or provide an alternative viewpoint on a case or assignment. In addition, I had the opportunity to work closely with Adam as an advisor on his group’s capstone project. While our focus was on the accounting and finance implications of the group’s recommendation, it was clear that Adam had a full understanding of both the financial and strategic implications of the case.

The attribute that distinguishes Adam from his peers is his care and concern for his classmates. Students in prestigious MBA programs often view the world as a zero-sum game, and competition rather than cooperation is the norm. Adam demonstrated his collegiality in our fall 2024 commencement ceremony. He formally graduated from our program in August 2024 and began his coursework at the University of Texas immediately thereafter. However, the majority of his classmates did not graduate until December 2024. As we gathered for our ceremony, I noticed Adam in the audience. Following the ceremony, I spoke with him and told him I was surprised to see him there, given that he had already graduated and final exams in his first semester in law school were approaching. His response was simple: “I wanted to be there for my friends and share their accomplishments with them.”

Adam has the highest level of respect among the faculty, program office staff, and classmates. He truly embodies the A&M Core Values of Leadership, Integrity, Selfless Service, Respect, Excellence, and Loyalty. He is an outstanding young man with unlimited potential and will be the type of alumnus we will hold out to future Mays MBA students.”

Dr. Jerry Strawser
Associate Dean for Graduate Programs
KPMG Chair in Accounting
Professor of Accounting

DON’T MISS: MBAS TO WATCH: CLASS OF 2025

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