Vanessa Gutzeit

I would really attribute a lot of my success to my network and my family and friends for their support. Even going back to my parents, my mom is a leader in business, in financial consulting. She always empowered me to believe that I could do whatever I wanted in my life, and kind of gave me the ropes to help on that journey. All of my other friends and family and my husband have constantly supported and believed in me, even as I went through a lot of these crazy different career paths and transitions. You won't get anywhere without your mentors, your collaborators, your teammates, your mentees, and all the people in your network, and so that's really critical.

The best career advice I've ever received is to be confident in your own knowledge and abilities, especially as a woman. I think imposter syndrome can be real, you know, as you're constantly changing career paths like I did. You don't always think you're the expert in the room, or the smartest in the room, but there is a reason that you're there, and it's important to always ensure that you have a space, and you're valid for being there, and your opinions and thoughts are good ones, and you should trust them.

I think the biggest advice I would give is to find your passion area. At BCG, I did so many different types of projects in the pharmaceutical space, and they could all be really interesting and exciting. But it's so much more fun and it makes work so much more enjoyable when you can do something like I'm doing right now, where I wake up and go to work, and I'm working in a field and in a place that I'm truly, genuinely passionate about. So I think, you know, take your time to explore as you're young and figure out what that is for you, but at the same time, try to, where you can, optimize for a career path that really keeps you excited and energized in your journey.

I think in pharmaceuticals generally, there's constantly a lot of different policy shifts going on in the government. There's always different stigmas around pharmaceutical manufacturers, and medicines, and essentially how that field operates in the U.S., especially compared to outside of the U.S. So I think it's always a challenge to ensure that, you know, in the end, we are trying to get medicines onto the market to help patients, and that we really have the best intention for that in all that we do, and that's at the core of our value. In neuropsychiatry, a big challenge still remains to be the stigma around psychiatric illness. The field has come really far, and generally the world has come really far in terms of the acceptance and transparency about mental illness, but we are so behind from a medicine development standpoint because there was stigma for so long about treating patients in this space. This isn't like oncology or immunology, where we've been really deeply studying and producing medicines for decades. It's really kind of finally a new wave of innovation in the space, with new medicines coming out in the next three to five years, pretty much more rapidly. So, I think continuing to really put the energy and the investment in propelling the research forward that we need to understand these diseases and treat them is super important.

I think transparency is a huge one, and teamwork is another one. You won't get anywhere without your mentors, your collaborators, your teammates, your mentees, and all the people in your network, and so that's really critical. And transparency is super important, you know, being honest at work, being straightforward up front, and I think that makes things more efficient and more impactful. Same in your personal life as well.