There When You Need Them

When Angell Alvarez works the night shift as a lieutenant Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) for Montclair State University’s Emergency Medical Services (EMS) program, she sleeps in her uniform so she’s ready for emergency calls.

That way, when she gets a call during the night, sometimes three or four of them, she can quickly jump out of bed, grab her equipment and rush to the scene in the ambulance parked right outside of the EMS base.

As a senior majoring in Molecular Biology, Alvarez joined the EMS program, to receive hands-on patient-care experience and provide comfort to people who need assistance no matter the time of day.

I really love my job since we’re getting called to someone who’s possibly having the worst day of their life and I’m going to offer that person comfort and make their day a little better. Overnights are more hectic because if somebody’s calling you at three in the morning, they probably need to go to the hospital. So while we are allowed to sleep, those are the calls we really have to be on go for.

Liliana Esmail, a senior majoring in Biology, is also a lieutenant EMT who works alongside Alvarez. She describes her shifts as being unpredictable.

Your shifts really can be unpredictable because you could go a day where you have nothing or you could go a day where every hour you clear from one call you get sent to the next but it’s also the fun part of the job.

Read more about what our students on the EMS team had to say!