For the Smaller Me

How one Newark EMS Corps Graduate is building the version of herself she once needed

Poised in her Newark EMS Corps shirt, it's hard to believe 25-year-old Shandra Lora ever shrank from herself. Today, she is EMT-certified and on her way to becoming a Newark firefighter. In her own quiet way, she is building the version of herself that her eight-year-old self once needed.

Arriving in Newark from Canada as the daughter of Dominican immigrants, she navigated new school environments in French, Spanish, and English before middle school. At some point along the way, she was diagnosed with a learning disability and placed in a special needs classroom— a label that shaped how she saw herself for years before she came to understand that she, as Shandra put it, ‘just had a different way of thinking.’

She loved her friends but dreaded the educational part of school, the part where she always felt a step behind. She didn't feel like she was where she needed to be. . "I would just look away so the teacher wouldn't make eye contact, so I wouldn't have to go in front," Shandra remembers. "I always felt I was behind, and my friends were just in front. I could never reach that space in between."

She graduated from high school in 2019, tried Essex County College for about a month, and decided it wasn't for her. After that, she went to work as a paraprofessional, moving between different districts over the course of several years. While she enjoyed the work, she knew it wasn’t the final stop for her. "If I stayed there, I would have stayed there forever," she says. "And I didn't want that." As the oldest of her siblings and the first in her family to build a career in this country, she understood that settling wasn't really an option. There was too much riding on her motion.

THE CLICK
Something inexplicable shifted around the time she turned twenty-four: she wanted to be a firefighter. After spending most of her life making herself smaller and feeling behind, Shandra realized her place in the community was right in the middle of helping others. She didn't have a plan yet, but she started training her body anyway, and she started moving puzzle pieces around in her head even when she didn't know what the picture would look like.

Then she discovered Opportunity Youth Network’s Newark EMS Corps program and decided to take a step toward her goal. Newark EMS Corps is a five-month, paid Emergency Medical Technician training program for young people ages 18–26, offering hands-on instruction, mentorship, wraparound support, and job placement to launch graduates into careers in emergency response.

 "I had nothing to lose," she says. She applied, sat for an interview a couple of months later, and was accepted soon after. The decision was quiet, clear, and entirely hers.

WHAT WAS DIFFERENT
Support is what kept her coming back to school, but she's careful about how she uses the word. "There's a difference between people who are just there to be there," she says, "and people who actually want to be there."

At EMS Corps, she found the second kind. She talks about her Advocate Counselor as someone who knew how to help her gather herself when she needed to. There were days she came to the program nearly in tears, days when family stress or self-doubt made it hard to think. He never tried to fix it for her. He simply reminded her that she could. "He'd say, 'You're fine. Just relax. Everything is in you. You just have to gather it,'" she remembers. "And I'd actually settle. I could have quit, but I didn't."

THE THIRD EXAM
The turning point for her came not in a single conversation, but on a single test. As the program got into gear, Shandra was still doubting herself. After failing her first two exams on the first attempt, she wasn’t sure if she could follow through with the program. But when she sat for the third one, she passed. After that, she realized she could actually pass all of them. "I was like, I have this."

The voice in the back of her head that had been telling her she was behind, that she couldn't learn, that everyone was ahead of her, didn't disappear entirely, but she stopped listening to it. "The only thing I can't do," she says now, "is tell myself I can't."

After that exam, the pattern broke. She stopped flinching from the work and started leaning into it, exam by exam, until certification was no longer a question of if, only of when.

THE BIGGER PICTURE
One question kept Shandra thinking: Where do you see yourself in the future?

For Shandra, the work itself is part of that vision. "I'm able to give to the community more," she says. "I'm able to help people when they think it's gonna be the end." Success is showing up for people on the worst day of their lives, with the kind of strength that takes years to build.

She wants to be a firefighter because, as she puts it, "a part of my childhood was feeling weak. I just want to show the smaller me that I was able to do that." At the same time, she knows the strength she is building isn't only the kind that runs into burning buildings. It is also the kind that holds steady, no matter what comes next.