Spencer McDonald (BS/AE/Math, ’20) gained an even deeper appreciation for the Heath Integrated Business and Engineering Program (IBEP) once he launched his own startup company. McDonald realized how much the program’s emphasis on thinking broadly across technology and business impacts what he does every day.
McDonald, a member of the inaugural Heath IBEP cohort in 2020, recently contacted some of his former IBEP mentors to thank them for the help they provided in guiding him along his college and professional journey.
“The connections I was able to make in IBEP have made such a critical difference,” McDonald said. “The IBEP mentors did so much to help open those first doors for me. It’s something you don’t even really recognize until you are older—how much that first internship helps, how much getting introduced to this one person helps. It propels early success and that becomes more success.”
After graduating from UT, McDonald attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he completed dual master’s degrees in aerospace engineering and transportation and logistics. He was part of a team that won a NASA machine learning competition and a business pitch competition that reinforced his interest in building technically grounded solutions to real world problems.
McDonald joined McKinsey & Company, a global management consulting firm, where he gained exposure to complex strategy and technology engagements and learned about execution and leadership. The experience gave McDonald the confidence to start his own company, Expert Insured, an AI-driven insurance maintenance system.
In less than a year, the Boston-based company has grown to more than $2 million in annual recurring revenue. McDonald’s staff includes a fellow Heath IBEP alumnus, Harshil Singapuri, who was in the 2022 cohort.
“Building the company has been very demanding and rewarding, and it has pushed me to integrate technical depth, business judgment, and operational execution every day,” McDonald said. “That’s the type of stuff I think IBEP got me thinking about very early on, whereas a lot of people that are just in engineering don’t get that experience of knowing about the business side of things until quite frankly they are living it.”
McDonald, who met his future wife, Gillian, in Heath IBEP, credits many of the presentations he delivered at UT for part of his professional success.
“At the time, it was very annoying to do make all those new Power Point slides,” he said with a laugh. “But in the business world, it’s all about communication. Leaving IBEP, I had such leg up on some of my other friends in business or engineering when it came to properly communicating, even technical terms or business terms.”
McDonald is ready for his IBEP role to come full circle and begin mentoring future cohort members, hoping they can gain insight from him that launches their future success.
“I’d really like to get more involved,” McDonald said. “If there’s any way I can support current or former students, I’d love the opportunity to give back to a program that has meant so much to me.”
Contact
Rhiannon Potkey (rpotkey@utk.edu)