FROM CLASS TO COVID
Students find college prepared them for pandemic
Universities teach you case studies — and one he read early in his last semester at in graduate school helped Khalid Islam in real life.
“The timing was so crazy,” said Islam, 33, a longtime city paramedic who just earned a master’s degree in emergency management at John Jay College.
“I had a class in the beginning of the spring [semester] that covered large-scale disasters. It was crazy because we did case studies, and I learned about a case study in SARS up in Toronto and how they had to deal with that, and it was almost similar to what we just went through with COVID.”
The 2003 SARS epidemic was contained before it spread beyond 8,000 cases worldwide. Canada reported 438 probable and suspect SARS cases. Forty-four people died.
Islam, Estefania Solis and Matthew Hart are among dozens of John Jay students who earned degrees this year as they battled on the front lines of New York’s coronavirus pandemic.
Islam works full-time as Mount Sinai Health System’s EMS training and safety manager. The system oversees 240 medics operating as part of the 911 system in Manhattan, Queens and Brooklyn.
Originally from Philadelphia, Islam has worked in the city’s EMS system for 15 years and as an educator in the field for the past six.
“I’ve worked through Ebola, I’ve worked through H1N1. So I’ve worked through different pandemics as a paramedic myself,” he said. “And I have never experienced anything on this level.”
As he prepared for his master’s degree, the number of New Yorkers becoming infected with the fast-spreading COVID-19 was rising exponentially.
“It was definitely never something I’d done in my career hands on, but the school definitely did prepare me for it,” he said of his studies of
Toronto’s handling of SARS. “It was crazy how coincidental that was.”
Solis thought she could balance her studies at John Jay with her National Guard duties, but she wasn’t counting on a pandemic the likes of which the world hadn’t seen in 100 years.
Solis, a 32-year-old presidential intern, studying criminology and legal interpreting and translation, was called up to serve with her Guard unit on the front lines.
“My community has been affected because some friends have had to fly back to their home countries and struggle with financial hardships, others have been laid off, many have gotten sick,” she said.
“At first, every day off, I would try to keep up with my homework and my tests,” Solis added. “I was physically exhausted.”
Finding a balance between the Guard, preparing for her finals, and moving after her roommate left the city, proved to be an almost insurmountable task.
“I wanted to keep going with school while I was in deployment because as I’m graduating this year, I didn’t want to stop my semester,” Solis explained.
After working with her professors to find a solution, Solis, who moved here from Panama in 2018, took her finals early.
“It was a little hard trying to catch up for my finals because I missed a lot,” she said. “I’m grateful that I can work during this time and help bring the cases down a little bit instead of being stuck at home and not being able to participate.”
Hart, 21, another National Guard member, was completing his degree in forensic psychology when he was activated.
“At times, it’s like, Why am I doing this? I’d rather just go to sleep or watch Netflix on my phone, or something like that,” Hart said, adding that he left about two hours a day for his studies.
Hart, who lives in Harlem, joined the National Guard in 2016. He was sent to COVID-19 test sites across the city, worked traffic control and handed out food to the needy.
“There’s hard days. You read the numbers on the news, the death count. Even if it was lower, it’d still be too much. It’s still people dying — even if it’s just one or two,” he explained.
Hart graduated in May, after the longest two months of his life, and will start earning his master’s degree at the Silberman School of Social Work at Hunter College in the fall.