On his way to becoming a Pharmacist for Marsh supermarkets and Pharmacist Consultant for the Indianapolis-based non-profit organization HealthNet, Andrew Gonzales ’14 had several eye-opening experiences at Butler that helped shape him both as a person and as a professional.

One was during a medical mission trip to Ecuador, where he encountered children living in abject poverty who “really had no type of medical care other than us.” Another was meeting and helping Indianapolis residents who came to Butler’s Community Outreach Pharmacy to get medical attention.

Both made him acutely aware of the need for the services he would provide once he earned his Doctor of Pharmacy degree.

“I saw things that I would not have seen otherwise,” he said.

Gonzales, who grew up in nearby Carmel, Indiana, said Butler also helped improve his people skills.

“Before I started at Butler, I didn’t have a lot of professional leadership type of skills,” he said. “Butler helped me understand leadership and how to communicate with people. I jumped in after a couple of years and I haven’t looked back since.”

He saw the value of connections when one of his Pharmacy professors, Jeanne VanTyle, put him in touch with the medical director at HealthNet.

“He was looking for somebody who could be really adventurous and willing to oversee something a lot of pharmacists don’t really know a whole lot about,” Gonzales said. “She brought my name to him.”

Gonzales still works for HealthNet, where he’s now Director of Pharmacy Services. In that role, he manages HealthNet’s extensive 340B program (a drug discount program) and serves as the organization’s main contact for medication-related services throughout the health centers. In addition to his administrative pharmacist roles there, he still cares about directly serving patients, so he moonlights at Costco Pharmacy a few times a month.

“Butler really did an excellent job getting me connections and teaching me how to talk to people and how to network with people,” he said, “because that’s what’s important in the long run.”