For the Smaller Me
How one Newark EMS Corps Graduate is building the version of herself she once needed
Poised in her EMS Corps shirt, it's hard to believe 25-year-old Shandra Lora ever shrank from herself. Today, she is EMS-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, but didn't feel like she was where she needed to be. She loved her friends but dreaded the educational part of school, the part where she always felt a step behind. "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."
That feeling of being behind followed her for years. It shaped how she moved through classrooms, how she raised her hand or didn't, how she measured herself against the people around her. Even as a kid, Shandra was paying attention to the texture of the relationships around her. She was learning the difference between people who are present in your life and people who know how to help you in a specific moment. "There's a difference between having a family and having someone that actually gives you support," she says. That awareness would later shape how she recognized the right mentors when she found them.
She graduated high school in 2019, tried Essex County College for about a month, and decided it wasn't her path. After that, she went to work and kept working. For years, she held a job as a paraprofessional supporting kids with disabilities, and she genuinely loved it. Every day was different, and the work mattered to her. Even so, she knew it wasn't where her story ended. "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 staying still 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. 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 LEAD's EMS Corps program online and decided to take a step toward her goal. "I had nothing to lose," she says. "What were they gonna do, take my email?" 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 LEAD, she found the second kind. She talks about her advocate counselor, Mr. Odom, as someone who knew how to help her gather herself when she needed to. There were days she came to school 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."
That kind of presence is something Shandra has come to recognize as rare, and worth naming. The people around her at LEAD were invested in her becoming.
THE THIRD EXAM
The turning point for her came not in a single conversation, but on a single test. Two exams in, Shandra was still doubting herself. Then she sat for the third one, and 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 whether, only of when.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
Ask Shandra what adults don't understand about her generation, and her answer comes quickly. "Patience," she says first. "We're young. We're hotheaded. If we don't see it right away, we just blow up."
After patience, she names support, and then passion. Real passion, not paycheck passion. "If you don't have love and passion, everything kind of breaks down. Because you have to actually want them to succeed." She knows the difference because she has lived on both sides of it. She has worked with people who showed up because they had to, and she has been mentored by people who showed up because they wanted to. The people she'll one day serve as a firefighter will know the difference too.
