Junior college jump-started transfer student’s experience
Carolina Covenant scholar Melia Grady has led student government and completed pharmacy internships at Howard and Rutgers.
With a father in the Army, Melia Grady is used to transition. Her family was at Fort Lee in Virginia when she applied to Carolina, and now they are at Lackland Air Force Base in Texas. But Grady, a recipient of Carolina Covenant and Red, White and Carolina Blue scholarships, will be at UNC-Chapel Hill.
A transfer student from Richard Bland College in Petersburg, Virginia, Grady played a key role in that junior college finally getting its independence from the College of William & Mary. The student assembly president made a heartfelt presentation to the Virginia House higher education committee, telling the legislators about the institution’s impact on the surrounding community and on her own life.
“I had plenty of good experiences to talk about because of everything that I’ve gotten from it and everything I’ve seen. It changed my whole life trajectory,” Grady said. The bill later passed both legislative houses with amendments made by Gov. Glenn Youngkin. “It was so amazing to see the impact I had made.”
Grady wants to make an impact at Carolina, too. She plans to double-major in biochemistry and psychology and later enroll in the UNC Eshelman School of Pharmacy, ranked No. 1 nationally. “The ultimate goal is pharmacy school, and UNC has the top one in the country,” Grady said. “I’ll be on campus, so I can talk to some professors, maybe get some internships, or maybe get some shadowing opportunities.”
A three-week 2024 summer internship at Howard University, where she met practicing pharmacists and worked in a compounding lab, sparked her interest in pharmacy. “That’s where I learned that you can go into over 100 fields with a PharmD degree,” she said.
Grady built on that experience this summer at the six-week Summer Health Professions Education Program at Rutgers University for students interested in medicine, nursing, dentistry as well as pharmacy.
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Grady also wants to be an advocate for others, something she did as student assembly president and as a resident assistant in junior college. The career goal on her Carolina application combined advocacy and pharmacy: to develop health care interventions for underserved communities.
“I really want to work in rural areas because those areas don’t have a lot of resources, and sometimes the pharmacist can be the person that they go to for multiple things,” Grady said. “I want to be that pharmacist in their life that is there to help them, to be part of their support system.”
She also wants to advocate more broadly for these rural communities. “I want to be able to uplift those communities so that they can get more resources,” Grady said. “Sometimes the laws that are passed might not be in favor of those rural communities, so knowing how the laws work in a state is the best way to advocate for the people in a rural area.”
Beyond her career goals, Grady also looks forward to enjoying her time on a bigger campus, with more club and sports options. Carolina’s school spirit has always attracted her, she said.
“I heard about the school spirit before I even heard about the school itself,” Grady said. “I love people who take pride in where they come from, so I that’s the main reason why I applied.”
She’s also savvy enough to realize that that school spirit has other benefits. “If somebody is prideful in the school that they go to, then they’re going to want to tell you all about it. So I feel like it would be easier to find like resources because everybody’s going to want to talk about it.”
