Jacquelyn Halushka

I attribute my success to my faith and my family. I know it sounds cliche, but I actually mean it. Especially these days with the economy and everything going on, my faith has been crucial. Whenever I'm stressed, I give it to God. My family keeps me grounded and supported - I have a huge family, and I'm my dad's only girl, so we spend a lot of time together. It's a big Ukrainian family, and they keep me busy with everything from my dad's political campaign to welcoming new nieces and nephews. But truly, my faith and family are the foundation of everything I do.

The best career advice I ever received is: if you're bored, never stop learning. If you're bored or complacent, or you don't feel challenged, it's because you're not learning enough. I'd say keep learning - keep pushing yourself to learn more, even if it's in your job. Learn more about a department, learn more about a team that you work with, or just continue your education when you're off the clock, because it makes your job a lot more rewarding if you know what's going on and if you can implement your education into what you're doing. Or if you can just implement any research that you do on your own into what you're doing, it does make you sort of a superpower. It also really impresses your bosses - I can say that from experience.

Master the art of being able to take criticism well. This is definitely something that I've learned in every single role, and not everybody has a grip on that. It can be really, really helpful if you actually have a good team that's not just beating you down. If you can take good critique and actually apply it somewhere, it's helped me in a lot of ways. Being able to receive constructive feedback and use it to improve has been one of the most valuable skills I've developed throughout my career.

I'd say that probably the biggest challenge right now - and I'm lucky that I got my job before a lot of this boom happened - but one of the bigger challenges that anyone trying to get a position in business administration is going to face is AI, or beating AI, or learning about AI. There's all these softwares now that have made legal assistants and secretaries almost obsolete. So I think I'd go back to what I said before: educate yourself as much as possible, learn how to use AI tools, learn how to keep up with modern technology and the market as much as possible. Don't stay complacent, because if you do, you may lose your job to a computer. I know that sounds a bit cynical, but it's the reality we're facing.

In my work, the biggest value is communication. I work best with a team, and making sure that you're communicating with your team - and communicating effectively - is crucial. Unfortunately, these days that can be kind of difficult when you're working on Teams, or Slack, or email, and sometimes things get misconstrued. Being an effective communicator has always been a really big deal for me. In my personal life, I'm very religious, so I put God in everything that I do. My faith guides my decisions and helps me stay grounded, especially during challenging times.