Alumni Profile
Eileen Sheedy-Currie ’74
Surviving in a Big Way
Photo: Fred Field
E
ileen Sheedy-Currie ’74 has a personality the size of Texas and will tell you in a big way about the love she has for her adopted home state, about making it in a man’s world, and about being a survivor. After a brief stint in teaching, she took on the corporate world and a career in headhunting. “I did it for the sheer challenge,” Currie says. “No women were doing it.” That business would take her from New York to Boston, where she opened her own firm, to Houston, where she relocated in 1982 after marrying John Currie ’73. One of the few female students on campus during her time at Bowdoin, Currie says it helped to have spent so much time around men in college. “Entering the workforce in the late 1970s was like going to a Beta party.” Currie uses that same humor to handle many of the challenges in her life, including chronic illness, which began in her thirties. 24 BOWDOIN | SPRING 2014
“I’m a cancer survivor,” she declares, and then without missing a beat, quips, ”I mean really, you think I picked this hairstyle? Seriously? I’ve got the DNA nobody wants.” Currie says among the joys that come with being in her sixties are being comfortable in her own skin and not giving a hoot what anyone thinks. It is with this kind of candor that Currie offers a criticism of her alma mater. Where the class of 1975 has been celebrated as the beginning of true coeducation at Bowdoin, Currie points to what she calls “the ghost women”—the female students already on campus in 1971—who she says aren’t given proper acknowledgment. Still Currie speaks fondly of the impressions Bowdoin made on her, including both the drive to do superb research and the confidence to say, “I don’t know, but I will find out.” Currie has employed both to survive life’s challenges, big and small. “You get out of bed every single morning. You face it. You go on. You push. Period.”