What volunteering during a crisis taught this medical student

On the list of “fun ways to spend your early 20s,” answering nonstop phone calls
in a makeshift crisis clinic while eating cold granola bars in an N95 mask
probably doesn’t rank very high. And yet, when the world tilted off its axis and
our hospital went into crisis mode, that’s exactly where I chose to be.

I signed up as a medical student volunteer partly out of duty, partly out of
curiosity, and partly because I’m terrible at sitting still. What I didn’t
expect was how much that chaotic season would reshape how I think about medicine,
patients, and myself. Volunteering during a crisis didn’t just “look good” on a
CVit rewired my idea of what it means to be a doctor.

Why I volunteered when everything felt like it was falling apart

When a crisis hitswhether it’s a pandemic, a natural disaster, or a community
emergencymedical students often get pulled out of clinical rotations for safety
reasons. Overnight, I went from rounding on patients to watching lectures on my
laptop in sweatpants, while my hospital quietly (and then not so quietly)
scrambled to respond.

That gap created an unusual opportunity. Across the country, medical schools and
hospitals began organizing student response teams and volunteer corps. Students
helped run hotlines, assisted with telehealth triage, tracked test results,
delivered medications, supported contact tracing, and even organized childcare
and errands for exhausted clinicians. These roles let us contribute while still
respecting safety and training boundaries.

For me, the choice to volunteer came down to three things:

• A need to do something tangible. Watching case counts rise from my couch felt unbearable. I wanted to move, not just study.
• A chance to learn in real time. Crisis medicine moves faster than any classroom. I knew I’d never get this kind of education from a textbook.
• A sense of responsibility. I wasn’t yet a doctorbut I wasn’t “just a student” either. I had skills I could use to help.

I thought I was simply volunteering my time. What I actually volunteered was my
comfort zone.

Lesson #1: Medicine is more than memorizingit’s being useful under pressure

Medical school is famous for information overload. We spend years learning every
enzyme, pathway, and obscure syndrome. Crises, however, are ruthlessly practical.
No one calling the hotline cared that I could list all the side effects of a
rare chemo drug. They cared about whether their loved one’s breathing sounded
“normal” over the phone.

Turning theory into action

During one shift, I spoke with an older woman whose husband had a fever, cough,
and new shortness of breath. She was scared; he was stubborn; I was a second-year
medical student with a checklist and a supervising physician on Slack.

I walked her through questions about symptoms, duration, risk factors, and red
flags. I explained warning signsconfusion, blue lips, struggling to speak full
sentencesthat meant she should call emergency services immediately. Then I gave
her clear steps for monitoring him at home and connected her with our telehealth
team for follow-up.

It hit me that day: all the physiology lectures in the world meant very little if
I couldn’t translate them into calm, actionable guidance for someone panicking on
the other end of the line. Volunteering forced me to:

• Speak clearly instead of hiding behind jargon.
• Prioritize the most important information instead of reciting everything I knew.
• Make decisions based on imperfect information and time pressure.

In other words, I started learning how to be useful, not just knowledgeable.

Lesson #2: Patients remember how you made them feel, not how smart you sounded

Before the crisis, I secretly thought good doctors were the ones who always had
the most impressive differential diagnosis. After volunteering, I realized that
in moments of fear and uncertainty, what people crave most is not brillianceit’s
emotional stability.

On the crisis hotline, we took calls that were technically simple but emotionally
enormous:

• “Is my cough bad enough to worry about, or am I overreacting?”
• “My dad won’t admit he’s getting worse. How do I convince him to be seen?”
• “I live alone. If I get sick, who will know?”

The medical content mattered, of course. But what people often rememberedand
what they thanked us forwas feeling less alone. Volunteering taught me how to:

• Listen without rushing. Even with a full call queue, people needed space to tell their story.
• Validate fear without amplifying it. “You’re not overreacting; lots of people are worried about this. Let’s sort out what’s going on together.”
• Offer hope that wasn’t fake. I couldn’t promise “everything will be fine,” but I could promise, “Here’s what we can do next.”

That “bedside manner without the bedside” became one of the most valuable skills I
picked up, and it’s something research now backs up: volunteering can deepen
empathy, strengthen communication skills, and increase a sense of purpose for
student volunteers.

Lesson #3: Health care is a team sportand volunteers are part of the roster

As students, it’s easy to imagine medicine as a hierarchy with attending
physicians at the top and everyone else trickling down underneath. Crisis work
broke that illusion fast.

Our volunteer team included:

• Medical students doing triage calls and follow-up check-ins.
• Nurses coordinating symptom management, test results, and escalation.
• Residents managing rapidly changing protocols and supervising us in real time.
• Public health workers tracking contact chains and community spread.
• Social workers connecting families with food, shelter, and mental health resources.

My job wasn’t to be the hero. My job was to not be the bottleneck.
Sometimes that meant quickly gathering a history and escalating to an attending.
Sometimes it meant documenting efficiently so the next person could pick up the
thread. Sometimes it meant admitting, “I’m not sure, but I can find someone who
is.”

Volunteering during a crisis taught me:

• Teamwork is a clinical skill. You have to communicate clearly, share information, and respect each person’s role.
• Leadership isn’t about titles. Student-led response teams can coordinate dozens of volunteers and projects effectively.
• Volunteers extend the system’s reach. Tasks we took onphone triage, wellness check-ins, logisticsfreed up clinicians to focus on complex care.

I stopped seeing myself as “in the way” and started seeing myself as part of the
response infrastructure. That mental shift was huge.

Lesson #4: Resilience isn’t about being toughit’s about having support

If you’ve ever tried to sound calm on the phone while your own heart is racing,
you know that crisis work can be emotionally expensive. We heard fear, grief,
anger, and sometimes denial. We worried about our own families. We doomscrolled
more than we’d like to admit.

Early on, I thought resilience meant “not being affected.” Spoiler: that’s not
resilience; that’s emotional numbness with better branding.

Through volunteering, I learned healthier forms of resilience:

• Peer debriefing actually helps. After tough calls, we took a few minutes in our group chat or huddles to decompress. Just hearing “Yeah, that was rough” was grounding.
• Boundaries are part of patient safety. Fatigued volunteers make more mistakes. Staying within scheduled shifts and taking breaks wasn’t selfishit was responsible.
• Asking for mental health support is normal. Some of us used counseling services, mindfulness workshops, or faculty mentors to process what we were seeing and hearing.

Research on volunteering backs this up too: people who volunteer regularly
report reduced stress and better overall well-being, especially when they have
social support and clear roles. The key is not to grind yourself into burnout in
the name of “helping.”

Lesson #5: Crises are brutal teachers of ethics and humility

During lectures, we discuss ethics in calm, hypothetical scenariosneatly
packaged cases with multiple-choice answers. During a crisis, ethical questions
show up uninvited and messy.

I remember a call from a daughter whose mother lived in a crowded apartment with
other relatives. Isolation was basically impossible. We could talk hand hygiene,
masking, and ventilation all day, but we couldn’t magically give them a spare
bedroom or extra bathroom.

Volunteering forced me to confront uncomfortable truths:

• Health advice lands differently depending on someone’s resources.
• “Doing the right thing” often collides with work, childcare, and housing realities.
• Systems-level inequities show up as individual “noncompliance.”

Instead of judging, I started asking more questions: “What’s actually possible
for you?” “Who else lives with you?” “What’s the hardest part about following
this plan?” That shiftfrom blaming to problem-solvingwas one of the most
important lessons I learned.

How volunteering reshaped my idea of being a doctor

Before the crisis, my mental image of “future me” was a white coat, a stethoscope,
and a very dramatic TV-drama walk down the hospital hallway. After volunteering,
that image changed.

Now, when I think about being a doctor, I think about:

• Public health, not just individual care. Medicine doesn’t stop at the clinic door. Communication, education, and systems design all matter.
• Lifelong adaptability. Protocols changed weekly, sometimes daily. Learning to pivot without panicking is part of the job.
• Serving in ways that aren’t always glamorous. Call-center shifts, data entry, and logistics are not Instagram-worthybut they are essential.

Volunteering showed me that my value wasn’t tied to my year in training or how
many big procedures I’d observed. It was tied to my willingness to show up, to
learn quickly, and to care about people when they needed it most.

Thinking about volunteering during a crisis? Here’s what I’d tell other medical students

If you’re a medical student considering crisis volunteeringwhether during a
pandemic, a natural disaster, or a community emergencyhere are some lessons
I wish I’d had on a checklist:

1. Choose roles that are structured and supervised

Look for programs that:

• Provide clear job descriptions (e.g., hotline triage, logistics, telehealth support).
• Offer training and protocolsnot just “shadow and figure it out.”
• Have built-in supervision and escalation pathways.

You’re there to help, not to improvise your own scope of practice.

2. Protect your own health and boundaries

Crisis work can easily turn into “I’ll just take one more shift” until you’re on
your fifth “last” shift of the week. Set realistic limits and honor them. Sleep,
food, movement, and social connection are not luxuriesthey’re protective gear
for your brain.

3. Reflect as you go, not just afterward

Keep a short reflection journal or notes app where you jot down:

• One interaction that stuck with you.
• One thing you learned.
• One thing you want to do differently next time.

Those reflections become raw material for future growth, personal statements,
and, frankly, therapy topics if you ever need them.

4. Remember that small acts scale up

It’s easy to feel like your contribution is tiny compared with the magnitude of
the crisis. But every accurate triage call, every calm explanation, every
documented chart entry contributes to a system that functions a little more
smoothly. Crisis responses are built from thousands of small, unglamorous,
competent actions.

500 extra words: One week that changed everything

To really understand what volunteering during a crisis taught me, it helps to
zoom in on one specific weekthe kind of week that quietly rearranges your brain
and only later gets a dramatic soundtrack in your memory.

It was a Monday when our coordinator messaged: “We’re opening an extra phone line
for high-risk patients this week. Can you cover three evening shifts?” I had an
exam coming up, a half-finished research draft, and a laundry situation that
could legally be classified as alarming. I said yes anyway.

Day 1: My first call of the evening was a middle-aged man with
diabetes who had just tested positive. He wasn’t afraid for himselfhe was
terrified for his elderly mother, who lived with him. We spent 20 minutes
walking through isolation strategies in a small apartment: eating in different
corners of the room, masking, cracking windows, cleaning high-touch surfaces,
and arranging for a neighbor to leave groceries at the door.

At the end of the call he said, “I feel like I have a plan now. I can breathe
again.” I realized I hadn’t given him any miracle cure. I had given him something
deceptively simple: structure in a moment of chaos.

Day 2: A young woman, an essential worker, called on her break.
She had mild symptoms but no paid sick leave and was worried about missing work.
Medically, the advice was clear; socially and financially, nothing about it was
simple. We talked through community resources, short-term options, and ways to
speak with her employer. After the call, I sat staring at my computer, feeling
the limits of what “health care” usually counts as its job.

For the first time, I really understood why public health experts talk about
social determinants of health. It wasn’t a buzzword. It was this woman, on her
ten-minute break, trying to decide between protecting her health and keeping her job.

Day 3: I had what we diplomatically called a “challenging call.”
The caller was angryat the system, at the delays, at the mixed messages they’d
heard. Some of that anger landed squarely on me. My first instinct was to get
defensive. Instead, I took a breath and said, “You’re right, this is frustrating,
and you’ve had to repeat yourself a lot. Let’s see what I can help clear up.”

By the end, we’d untangled a testing mix-up and arranged for follow-up. The
caller didn’t thank me profusely or apologize for their tone. But they did say,
“Okay. That’s better.” In crisis work, “That’s better” is a win.

Day 4: I hit an emotional wall. Between calls, the silence in my
tiny apartment felt loud. I was behind on studying. I was doomscrolling late at
night. During a brief huddle, I mentioned that I was feeling drained. Our
supervisor didn’t give a heroic speech. She just said, “You’re off Friday. Non-negotiable.”

I used that day to sleep, go for a real walk, and study in a coffee shop with my
phone on “do not disturb.” It felt indulgentuntil I noticed how much more
present I was on Saturday’s shift. That was the week I truly believed that
stepping back sometimes is part of showing up well.

Day 5: A call came in from someone whose loved one had just been
admitted to the hospital. No visitors were allowed. They wanted to know what to
expect. I couldn’t shorten their hospital stay or bend visitation rules. What I
could do was explain the process: how updates would be communicated, who they
could call, and what questions to ask the team. We also talked about how to take
care of themselves while they waitedeating, resting, letting themselves feel
scared without spiraling.

When we hung up, I realized how much of crisis volunteering is about being a
translator: converting medical systems, policies, and jargon into human language
and manageable steps. It’s not dramatic. It doesn’t come with applause. But it
matters deeply to the people on the other side.

Looking back, that single week condensed nearly everything I learned from
volunteering during a crisis:

• That small interventions can shift someone’s entire emotional landscape.
• That structural problems show up in individual stories again and again.
• That my job is to be both informed and kind, both realistic and hopeful.

When I eventually return to full-time clinical rotations, I’ll bring my exam
scores and my textbooks. But I’ll also bring that weekthe calls, the pauses,
the moments when “I don’t know, but I’ll find out” was the most honest and
helpful sentence I could offer.

Volunteering during a crisis didn’t turn me into a hero. It did something more
sustainable: it nudged me a little closer to the kind of physician I want to
becomepresent, grounded, and willing to answer the phone when the world feels
like it’s on fire.