August 14, 2023
It was a long road for Paul Alebrande to get to the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, but looking back it all makes sense.
He was born in Romania and adopted by a family from Long Island, New York. He stayed in the area for college and graduated from St. Joseph’s University New York in May 2023 with a degree in chemistry and a double minor in biology and music.
“Throughout my life I’d always said that I wanted to become a physician,” said Alebrande, Pharm.D. candidate class of 2027, but his family encouraged him to consider pharmacy school because the pharmacy industry was already a huge part of his life.
As a kid he worked in a small pharmacy as a stock boy. In college he worked at Walgreens for two and a half years and then in a hospital pharmacy for another two and a half years. “I had five years of pharmacy experience under my belt, and not once did I think, ‘Hey, what about pharmacy school?’,” he said.
Alebrande worked at a Walgreens in New York during the COVID-19 pandemic when the role of pharmacy technicians expanded and they were trained to give vaccines. He was part of the first group of technicians trained in New York and he has vaccinated close to 2,000 people. This also gave him the opportunity to help run a COVID-19 testing site, which earned him a Walgreens Health Hero Award.
“The district manager came down and presented a certificate from the vice president of Walgreens thanking us for our hard work—I learned so much while I was there and I really thank the company for giving me my start in pharmacy,” he said.
Looking back now, Alebrande shared that pharmacy school was the clear career path for him. While he applied to several schools, the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy was his top choice.
When he got his acceptance email, he shared, “I was so happy. I was crying and thought ‘Wow, I’m going to be part of something greater than myself.’”
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