Amanda McQuillan

I attribute my success to my mom, who is a previous CEO and Senior VP. She has absolutely shaped the way I see everything and has a very motivational story. We were incredibly poor when I was growing up - we joked that my parents were living on love, but I had a very happy upbringing. My mom decided when I was in elementary school that she was going to go back to college, so she went back full-time, worked full-time, had three kids, and didn't miss a single beat. She got her degree and then really moved her way up, and when she retired, she was a senior VP for a large lab company. What I think is the best part is how motivational my mom has been for women. When you grow up with that, you get that self-esteem, you get that power for other women and what we can do when we work together. She's taught me a lot about leading, but also leading with fairness and building other women up. She had 3 kids, I have four kids - work is important, but it's important to value the people themselves, the women, and all that they have going on in their lives. Just watching her my whole life have all of those skills has always inspired me to do something similar. She's a force to be reckoned with.

The best career advice I've received is about the power of networking. People say that pharmacy is a small world, but I feel like it's just a small world in general. You almost have to treat everything like it's an interview - don't burn bridges, work hard, be kind, and understand the power of networking with people. You could see somebody and work with somebody for a week now, and then in 20 years, they could totally change your career path and give you different opportunities just because they had a great experience with you when they worked with you the first time. It's about building those relationships and maintaining them throughout your career.

There are a few things I always say to people entering pharmacy. First, I think it is essential to be positive. We don't often think of it, but people choose to work with you, so if you have a great work ethic and a good, positive mindset, people are going to want to work with you. They're going to want you on their committee, they're going to want you at the table. When you're a supervisor, you hire a team, but they choose to stay with you - they pick you - so it's really important to just be a good person in life and be kind to others. Second, have the confidence to do it. In pharmacy, I think a lot of times residents and younger pharmacists get this imposter syndrome, but the truth is, you did a lot of education, and it's important to have confidence and learn and grow and put yourself out there so that you don't have to stay in your bubble. Finally, embrace innovation in healthcare. Healthcare is constantly going to be moving and changing, and you have the opportunity to stand back and watch it happen, or step up and step in and be part of the change. That's something really powerful we can do in healthcare - things are hard and tough and new, but having that confidence and self-esteem and communication skills to step up and step in to be part of the change is essential.

I think the biggest opportunity is what I'm doing with precision medicine. The way of the future with healthcare in general is personalized treatment, and what I do is taking a look at people's genes and genetic makeup to figure out how they metabolize medications. But this is a whole field that's coming up - most people don't realize that there's gene and cell therapy now that can cure things like sickle cell or hemophilia. We're kind of making the impossible possible, but it's new to healthcare, and anytime there's something new, it takes a lot of education and brainstorming. I do think that precision medicine is going to be the way of the future, and there's a lot of challenges that come with it, but I think it's going to be very big in the next 10 to 15 years. As for AI, I think it serves as a really great tool that cuts down on time and allows me to do more of my niche area. It's helpful for building documents and business proposals, but I also teach at WVU, so I worry about people not using foundational skills. AI is meant to be a tool once you know what you're talking about - I worry about people replacing those foundational skills and education with AI.

I think it's important to be respectful and to be kind. Those are the main values of my life - being kind to people and being respectful is really just the core values of how I treat people and how I surround myself with people. Whenever your foundation is built on that, your goal is to build people up, not to create competition. That's how I always think about the people that work for me or around me - my goal is for you to be better than me, and my goal is to do that with kindness and respect, because that's really how people learn and where they want to work. Whether you're at work or outside, there's something contagious about somebody's positivity and kindness, and so that is something that I have just rooted my whole life on.