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Optometry
When David Baptiste, OD ‘96, was a youngster, he would wait for his father, a nursing assistant in a military hospital in New Orleans, to get off from work. The 5-year-old would sit patiently in the hospital cantina and watch as workers at the facility came into the restaurant in their scrubs and white coats. And, many of them would recognize the boy.
“Hey, you’re Mr. B.’s son, let me buy you some ice cream,” they would often say to him. The lad had a thing for ice cream and was certainly impressed that being Mr. B.’s son apparently gave him a leg up in that area. So, he wanted to know more about the people who worked at the hospital like his father.
“I’d ask them, ‘What do you do?’ And, they’d say, ‘We’re all doctors,’” recalled Dr. Baptiste. “And, I thought to myself, ‘Wow, any job that provides you enough money to buy all the ice cream you want for kids waiting for their parents, well, that’s what I want, too. I’m going to be a doctor!’”
It wasn’t that easy, the doctors explained to him. To be a doctor, one has to love math and science. Fortunately, at a young age, the boy had already developed an affinity for math and science.
Fast forward a few years, to when Dr. Baptiste was in the fourth or fifth grade. He had realized that being a doctor had nothing to do with ice cream, but by then he had been bitten by the science bug and was already on that path.
A locker room brawl in 10th grade helped Dr. Baptiste decide the kind of doctor he wanted to be was an optometrist. During the brawl, he was sucker-punched in the eye and had an injury that needed to be addressed by a Doctor of Optometry.
“If I had gotten punched in the mouth, I may have become a dentist,” said Dr. Baptiste.
It turned out to be the foundation for a career that has been marked by drive, determination, and perseverance.
Dr. Baptiste attended Xavier University in New Orleans. During his time there, he shadowed two optometrists and two ophthalmologists.
“After shadowing the ophthalmologists, it was not what I thought I wanted to do,” said Dr. Baptiste. “When I met the optometrist, they were these really cool, happy people. The personality profile fits my personality better.”
After graduating from Xavier with a degree in chemistry and a minor in biology, Dr. Baptiste started looking for the best optometry schools in the country. He settled on visiting three: New England College of Optometry (NECO), Indiana University School of Optometry, and the Pennsylvania College of Optometry (PCO).
During his first stop at a visit to PCO, Dr. Baptiste was interviewed by Bernard Lepri, OD ‘79, MS, MEd, and came away impressed with the College. Dr. Baptiste then stopped by the office of Robert Horne, who was then the associate dean for Student Affairs. Dr. Baptiste told dean Horne that the interview with Dr. Lepri had gone well and PCO seemed like a great place to be, but added he was flying out of Philadelphia the next day for a visit to the Indiana University School of Optometry.
“And, Mr. Horne said, ‘No, you’re not. You can cancel that flight,’” recalled Dr. Baptiste. “I told him that I didn’t even know if I was going to be accepted into PCO and he said, ‘I’ve seen your credentials, you don’t need to go to Indiana.’ I changed my ticket, and that was that.”
Dr. Baptiste, one of 12 African American students in his class, credits PCO and Philadelphia as “the place where I grew up.” It was his first time away from home and his time at PCO was marked by a rigorous academic schedule with a lot of direction from the faculty, and an overall welcoming attitude.
“Some of the things you learn in optometry school are unlike any other thing you’ve had to learn before. So, the material was tough,” said Dr. Baptiste. “You have to have people around you. I had a combination of locals who would help me emotionally to not feel so homesick, and then I had my teachers who took extra steps to talk with me from a professional standpoint.”
After graduating from PCO, Dr. Baptiste returned home to New Orleans where he was in a commercial practice for about a year and a half before going into a solo private practice. He opened his first office in 1998, a second in 2003, and was remodeling a third office in 2005 when disaster struck.
It was Hurricane Katrina, and it destroyed everything Dr. Baptiste had built to that point. Not only that, but insurance didn’t cover the losses.
“So, not only did I lose everything but I was saddled with the debt of a growing business. It’s one thing to start from zero, it’s another thing to start from negative,” he said.
It would take New Orleans years to recover from that hurricane, but Dr. Baptiste wasn’t going to wait around. He headed to Fort Worth, Texas, and practiced there for about seven years. But the area was saturated with optometrists and he was commuting an hour one way for his job.
A headhunter then caught wind of Dr. Baptiste’s background in laser surgery. Before he had opened his second office in New Orleans, Dr. Baptiste had worked in cornea pathology at Omni Eye Care Service in Atlanta. That skill set had allowed him to work in a laser center in New Orleans, along with his private practices. The headhunter matched Dr. Baptiste with a company in El Paso, Texas, which would eventually lead to him buying El Paso Optical Center in 2017, where he currently works and lives with his wife Regina, daughter Amaya, and son David, II.
Oh, and by the way, he negotiated the purchase of that business from his hospital bed after surviving a heart attack and subsequent heart surgery.
He’s fine now but has no plans to retire anytime soon.
“I see myself getting to a point in my career where I can help more people, new optometrists in the profession,” he said. “That’s what I would be doing when I’m not in patient care. I want to help educate as many new optometrists as I can.”
He has spent a lot of time giving back to the profession and the young people starting in it. He recently had a chance to visit with some of his PCO connections in July 2024, as part of the National Optometric Association (NOA) conference. Dr. Baptiste serves as a trustee at large and the National Optometric Student Association (NOSA) student director for the NOA.
But, ultimately, it was the foundation he received at PCO, and the drive to succeed, on which Dr. Baptiste has built a distinguished career.
“From an optometric standpoint, I feel like I got a top-notch education bar none at PCO,” he said. “My PCO experience gave me a confidence where I am not afraid to tackle optometry. I think when people see that, they want you to be a part of that team. It was an educational preparation for me to become a more fierce doctor.”
