Adelphi University students working in a group to study for an exam before Covid-19. Photo courtesy of Adelphi University.
LEARNING THE ROPES ON THE FRONT LINES
BY COURTNEY INGALLS & AUGOSTINA MALLOUS She is startled by the obnoxious sound titled “radiate” on her phone’s alarm clock and returns to her woke stage that she was in just five hours before. With barely any sleep and no time for breakfast, there is no motivation to look “nice” for a nursing student on this Monday morning in February during a global pandemic. Every morning, she begins her day by opening her MacBook Air to see “Nicole Fioretti” under a box with her face in it, alongside the faces of people she has met in person, and others with whom she has never been in a room.
Nursing students find ways to cope amid the pandemic. Nursing students and professors are slowly
adjusting to a new way of learning, while also bringing back the in-person contact that students need to excel in their studies. For nursing students specifically, most of their learning and training requires them to be in person and to have contact with actual patients, but that is not always possible during the coronavirus pandemic. Fioretti, a 19-year-old student enrolled at Molloy College in Rockville Centre, has only one class and one clinical in person; all of her other classes are online. “I can’t focus on my schoolwork in my own house,” she said. “I also can’t ever even escape school because I’m doing everything from home.” As a nursing major, the first year of classes is all about the fundamentals — learning
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how to take vitals and assess patients. “It’s scary. I learned the basics to my field in a non-traditional way, and I feel like there are lots of things I should be way better at doing by now,” she said. While Fioretti said she believes her school is doing its best to accommodate students, she has no choice but to practice on her family members in her living room instead of practicing on her classmates with her professors’ supervision. On Long Island, many colleges and universities tried to keep nursing students’ experiences as close as possible to what they had before. When it comes to nursing students’ classes, Rebecca Mazzoni, a junior nursing student at Adelphi University in Garden City, said certain safety steps and procedures were added to her courses. “For us, we had to do [personal protective equipment] training, which I’m sure we had to do, but now it’s just more emphasized because of Covid,” she said. Mazzoni also said students had to go through N-95 mask fittings, as well as take quizzes about new Covid-19 protocols. One aspect of nursing students’ studies that was harder to navigate during the pandemic was clinical hours. Dr. Renee McLeod, associate dean and chairwoman of the Hofstra University graduate nursing program, said students were pulled out of
