Giuliana Palasciano wasn’t sure about her career path when she came home from college last spring to finish out her senior year online. Then she saw the pandemic unfold on television.
“I was watching the news for weeks and was so interested in what the epidemiologists were saying,” said Palasciano, 22, a University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill graduate. “I kind of stumbled into public health.”
Now Palasciano, who lives in Commack, is enrolled in SUNY Stony Brook’s Masters of Public Health program, where enrollment is double what it was last year. Applications are up nationally and on Long Island not only in public health programs, but in nursing and medical schools, and programs for paramedics and EMTs.
“Everything that happened with COVID and the immense amount of interest I had in what the public health field was doing at the time, it made me think this was the