Given that Kaitlyn and Nicholas Rehberg met at ACPHS, you might assume their initial connection was pharmacy.
After all, when they met in Fall 2019, Kaitlyn (then Strumski) was a sophomore majoring in pharmaceutical sciences and Nicholas was in his last year of the pharmacy doctoral program.
Turns out, though, they were not smitten so much by a shared interest in pharm life, but in farm life. Or perhaps it was a combination of those things – an unlikely coupling of passions that neither expected to find in another.
“He had some of the same fundamental beliefs that I had around the lifestyle that he wanted to live,” said Kaitlyn, who grew up in a suburban community near Dallas, Pa., with a love for animals and desire for the country. “And yet, we both still wanted to be these professionals in the pharmaceutical industry.”
They had met and run into each other just briefly on campus in Nicholas’ final year, before the COVID pandemic hit and in-person learning ceased. But Nicholas remained in Albany after graduation, and Kaitlyn bucked the trend of studying remotely in Fall 2020 so she could conduct research with Professor Martha Hass. The dorms were closed, so she got an apartment. Nicholas would come over to hang out with a group of mutual friends.
Eventually, Nicholas was visiting whether or not other friends were there. He and Kaitlyn would run errands together, buy groceries – yes, sometimes at a farmer’s market. Maybe they’d grab lunch. Nicholas would hint at wanting more than friendship. “That was a nice date,” he’d say after an afternoon of mundane activities. Kaitlyn would reply, “That was a date? No.” She met his family at their farm in Cobleskill, Schoharie County, and fell deeper in love with the country.
Eventually, Kaitlyn said, she noticed that Nicholas’ “absence was louder than his presence.”
“I just liked being with him all the time,” she said. “If he was in the room, there was a smile on my face.”
They also formed a bond, which remains strong to this day, over chickens. For Valentine’s Day, while they were “not dating,” she bought him socks with chickens on them in deference to his love for the fowl on his family’s farm. A few months later, also while not dating, she went to the Tractor Supply Co. store outside Albany and bought six fluffy chicks that she raised for him as a birthday present.
Last June, following Kaitlyn’s graduation in May and the couple’s marriage and reception at a Pennsylvania barn-turned-wedding-venue, they relocated 15 chickens from the Cobleskill farm to their new rental home – a 100-acre farm in Somerset, N.J.
Shortly after the move, Kaitlyn started work as a senior scientist at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company’s New Jersey manufacturing facility. Nicholas had started work at a CVS Pharmacy in Brooklyn.
Their days are a stark contrast to other young professionals. After their fast-paced, sometimes stressful jobs fulfilling the requests of supervisors and customers, they come home to each other and farm chores – mowing acres of land, cleaning the chicken coops, tending their gardens.
But they see a connection, too, between their home life and the work they do making and administering medicines. They eat their own eggs, vegetables and bread that Kaitlyn bakes – as well as local meats. The whole, unprocessed foods are a prescription for their physical wellbeing; their rural lifestyle a balm for their mental health.
“It impacts your health, it impacts your mental health,” Nicholas said. “It impacts everything.”
At 24 and 27, they imagine having children some day and sharing their unusual blend of lifestyle, straddling ultramodern and uber-traditional environments.
Marrying pharmacy and farm-acy, as it were.