For most of my working life I was a software systems engineer. I started in 2006 as a webmaster and system administrator, and over the years the title followed the industry: DevOps, SRE, infrastructure engineering, cloud something or another.
EMS began as something I did on weekends.
It started just before Hurricane Sandy in October 2012, when I joined CERT, the Community Emergency Response Team program. I wanted to get involved in my community, and I felt like I didn’t have any useful skills. Sandy hit in the middle of our training. Hoboken was knocked flat for a week, with no power and no working utilities, and we were pulled out of class and put to work. The city’s 911 dispatch for police, fire, and EMS ran out of a room in City Hall, on radios packed in big orange Pelican cases powered by a gas generator. We also set up a bank of phones running off cellular modems for folks to call in for information. In that week I got a crash course in sheltering and feeding people, getting them medical equipment, and keeping communications running.
We finished CERT training that winter. Over the following years we were activated for storms, floods, and crowd assistance during festivals. In May 2016 I completed the Emergency Medical Responder (EMR) course, a level somewhere between BLS and EMT, and by April 2017 I had also joined a local volunteer ambulance corps, first as a BLS driver, and about a year later I earned my EMT certification. I rode until 2025. I was elected an officer of the corps twice and served as a team leader for our Rescue Task Force. I received an award for service during COVID, when our corps stayed operational and adapted to completely new protocols, and I have a CPR save: a patient we brought into the hospital in cardiac arrest who was later discharged. Most of all, I learned how to work on a team that works with other teams (ALS, police, fire, social workers) to help people through emergencies. All of it was a wonderful experience.
In 2023 I entered the RWJBarnabas Health paramedic program in Jersey City (Class 25), planning to work as a per diem paramedic alongside my engineering job. I completed the didactic portion of the program, August 2023 to August 2024. The highlight was well over 800 hours of in-hospital clinicals: burn center, emergency department, ICU, OR, NICU, labor and delivery, cardiac, and trauma. Working with nurses and learning from them was the biggest learning I did in the whole program, on every unit, though my EMS background pulled me toward the emergency department. The classroom skill labs never had the same pull for me as the hospital, time with patients, or my shifts on the ambulance.
Above all, the program gave me a profound respect for advanced life support. For two years I learned alongside paramedics and EMS physicians, and I saw what the job really is: a small crew bringing emergency medicine to wherever the patient is, a living room floor, the street, the back of a moving ambulance, often with no one else to turn to in the moment. Intubating, reading a 12-lead and deciding where the patient needs to go, running a code, managing a trauma: these are serious skills, and the paramedics I trained with carried them with real calm and judgment. I came to see that this is not work to do on weekends. It deserves full commitment, especially in the first two or three years of a career, when the learning curve is steepest and the chance of causing harm is highest.
In 2024 I lost my engineering job and was not able to find another. I started the last phase of the paramedic program, the ambulance-based clinicals, and finished the first four shifts, the introductory phase. By then I was out of money, and ahead of me were another six months of ambulance clinicals and then orientation as a new paramedic. I took a serious look at where I am in my life and how much time I have left for a career. EMS and nursing were where I had already built some basic skills, and working alongside nurses had shown me that nursing was the better long-term fit. So I stepped away from the paramedic program and pivoted hard into nursing school.
Since November 2024 I have worked as an ER tech, and I am now in the third of four semesters of nursing school. I love the job. I work with the nursing teams in every part of the ER: triage, fast track, high acuity, pediatrics, psych, trauma, stroke activations, and codes. There is constant learning and real camaraderie. I have been employee of the month twice and was nominated for a nursing excellence award as a tech.
Much of it happened on the back of an ambulance - some of the best and most challenging moments of my life.
Certifications, training, and awards
The notes below are from my paramedic coursework. They are study notes, not medical advice; follow your local protocols and current references.