One night in April, Kacia Wilson, a support service associate at Lenox Hill Hospital's emergency room, finished her shift at 12:15 a.m. before catching the train from Manhattan to her Brooklyn apartment. When the train stalled before it reached her stop, Wilson got an Uber for the final leg of her commute, arriving home exhausted after 1 in the morning. Then she had to get up for a 9 a.m. class.
“Before the pandemic started I worked about two shifts a month, but now I work long shifts almost every weekend,” said Wilson, a first-year student at New York Law School. “It’s been a really emotional time and I’ve been feeling physically and emotionally drained.”
Wilson is one of many undergraduate and graduate students who are also working as frontline responders to the coronavirus. While these jobs were demanding even before the virus hit, the pandemic has forced many of these student workers to devote even more time and energy to their work — in addition to putting themselves at increased risk for contracting the virus.
Wilson is part of the support staff for doctors and nurses, transporting patients to exam rooms, checking that there are adequate numbers of cardiac monitors, IV carts, and crash carts, and cleaning and disinfecting patient beds. Many other college students work as emergency medical technicians (EMTs). Kiki Ha works as an EMT at Cataldo Ambulance in Boston, where she is responsible for transporting patients from their residence to the hospital and ensuring that ambulances have the proper supplies.
“I was supposed to be working part-time since I’m still in school, but with the pandemic I’m working way more hours, a lot of overnights, and I pick up day shifts once in a while too,” said Ha, a sophomore at Boston University. “I used to be able to sleep a bit during overnight shifts, but now that the call volume is so high that’s just not possible anymore.”
Students who work as first responders face a unique set of academic and professional challenges. Despite their demanding and time-consuming profession, they are still responsible for attending online classes, completing assignments, and taking exams. Ha, for example, is a pre-med student who is currently enrolled in organic chemistry, physiology, sociology, and multivariable calculus in addition to regularly working 16-hour overnight shifts.
“I’ve been missing some class and not getting a lot of sleep and professors haven’t been super accommodating, especially in the chemistry department,” Ha said. “I’m in this cycle where I have class from 9 a.m. to noon, then I’ll study until midnight, go to work until 8 a.m., and then go to class again. The call volume has been so high that I’ve been feeling really burnt-out all the time. And when I do have free time I just want to crash instead of studying for my finals.” (Teen Vogue reached out to Boston University for comment).
Working as a first responder is an emotionally draining responsibility, even for non-students. Medical professionals have faced harassment from patients throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, and many hospital workers have also suffered from poor mental health due to the extreme strain that this crisis has put on their job. Students who work as first responders are facing not only poor mental health from chaotic work conditions but extreme stress from school — as well as chronic anxiety that they might catch the virus while on the job and pass it onto a loved one.
“Sometimes I think about how I spend time at home with my 8-year-old brother-in-law, who has diabetes, even though I risk being exposed every time I go to work,” said Rosa Jimenez, a senior at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and an EMT at Saint Barnabas Hospital in the Bronx. “Everything I do at work, such as disinfecting the ambulance before my shift and maintaining a sterile environment throughout the day, is mainly for my family members at home.”
“When the virus hit I isolated myself from everyone I know for the first couple of weeks because I just didn’t want to take any chances,” said Wilson, the New York Law School student. “My mom and two younger siblings all live together and I didn’t want to risk getting them infected. After a while I started visiting my family a bit more, but I still haven’t seen my boyfriend.”
Like Jimenez and Wilson, thousands of medical professionals across the country are also concerned about contracting the virus at work and infecting their loved ones. As the coronavirus pandemic caused a massive shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) in hospitals across the country, many health care workers have been forced to treat sick patients without proper gowns or masks to protect themselves.
“Sometimes patients refuse to wear their masks in the ambulance or get kind of combative, which can also be stressful because the back of an ambulance is a pretty small space and there just isn’t room to social distance,” Ha said.
Despite the unsafe conditions that many frontline responders must put themselves in to do their jobs, there has been an undeniable need for hospital workers, particularly in certain areas of the country. Sydney, a senior at Texas Christian University who asked not to use her last name, told Teen Vogue that she took a job as an EMT performing COVID screenings at critical infrastructure sites because she wanted to do her part during the pandemic.
“I actually got this job because of COVID,” Sydney said. “At work I am provided with a list of questions and I take temperatures of everyone coming into the sites and I have a protocol to deny people based on the screening questions and temperatures. A lot of people might assume that because it’s not a typical first responder job it’s not important, but a lot of people are relying on these sites to stay open and I help ensure that those who work there stay safe and healthy.”
Sydney resigned from a different EMT position due to their inability to work with her nursing school schedule and said she’s relieved that her new supervisors have been very supportive and make sure that she’s not scheduled to work the night before a big assignment. Unfortunately, not all student first responders have had the same experience.
“I think some of my professors thought that since we’re home now and taking online classes we would have more time to study, so some professors have been assigning more busy work,” said Ha. “A lot of people reached out and argued for accommodations and they’ve eased up a bit, but it’s still pretty hard for me to juggle everything, especially with finals coming up. Between work and class and studying, it's been really emotionally and physically taxing to juggle everything at once.”
Given the extreme stress that students working as first responders are facing, it would be understandable if some thought about quitting or taking a step back from work to focus on their studies or prioritize their health.
“I did think about quitting because I have a merit scholarship that requires me to make a 3.0 GPA or higher, and with my crazy work schedule and the move to online classes it’s been a lot harder to maintain my grades,” Wilson said. “But also I feel like my city is burning and I need to help in some way, so I’m just gonna do what I can to make it all work. I was born in New York and plan to live here for the rest of my life, and I see it as my responsibility to help this city and my community in any way that I can.”
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