Jacquelyn Dortch

I attribute my success to my cousin Sylvia, who passed away recently in 2024. She became my role model and mentor. She was born to a teen parent on the west side of Chicago in the 50s, but she went on to become a medical doctor and open her own practice. She and her mother, who was the same age as my mother, would come pick me up, and she took me under her wing. As I got into high school, she was just a mentor who would always tell me that I was smart and that life had much more to offer me, and how I should take advantage of the various different opportunities. She went to Southern Illinois University when she became a doctor, and I followed in her footsteps - that's where I went for college. For her to come out of the heart of the ghetto in the 50s and become a medical doctor at Rush Presbyterian St. Luke's was definitely a significant accomplishment, and she was just a role model and an example for me of unscripted excellence.

The best career advice I ever received came from a nun who was my supervisor early on in my career. I started to face some challenges, some unconscious bias and microaggressions, and she said to me, 'Never regard yourself as a victim, and realize that things are happening through you and not to you. Because if you didn't exist, people wouldn't try to figure out how to get around you.' That is something that I've held onto - that things are happening through me and not to me.

My advice to young women is that things don't happen haphazardly - you have to plan and set goals for yourself. The power of framing has been used in marketing throughout history. You could be sitting at home not thinking about food, and suddenly a commercial for a cheeseburger comes on, and you find yourself at Wendy's. So I tell people, frame your goals. Say them to yourself, repeat them to yourself every day. Keep a journal beside your bed, put a sticky note on your mirror, but constantly talk to yourself and frame your goals until you reach them. Planning and believing in yourself is the way to make things happen. Of course, there's always that lucky person that something happens to, but I think planning and believing in yourself is the way to make things happen.

I think the biggest challenge for me is the way that the world has been polarized and put right back to a place of racial tension. The more successful you become, the less likely you are to sit in rooms with people who look like you. And yet, people are in rooms making decisions about people who look like you. It's a big challenge to have lived experiences and have your affinity group be people who look like you, and to have people who've read about you in a book make decisions about you. There was a part of me for a long time that thought we could just be people, and we didn't have to be polarized by race. So it's been very challenging for me, five decades later, to have to always be concerned about race. That would be my biggest challenge.

The values most important to me are my faith in God - not the omnipresence or the outer world God, but God Himself - and my tenacity. My parents were faith believers, so I value my faith in God. I also value the fact that my parents have always taught me never to be afraid of anything. So I would say my faith and my belief in my ability to accomplish things are what matter most to me.