By Ace Johnson
First day
Walking into the Longest Student Health Center for his first day on the job, he tries to keep his distance from the people moving about in the main lobby as he figures out where he is to be located. After being assigned to the COVID hall, he goes to get changed before making his way there. He dons the full PPE gear, which includes gown, gloves, goggles, everything that may ensure he does not get infected while on the job. With no vaccine available, people right now are testing positive more often than not and he really just wants to be careful so he doesn’t get sick or end up bringing it home to his girlfriend. He spends the next several hours escorting potentially infected patients into the building and to their assigned rooms, taking their vitals while maintaining proper protocol, but still chatting them up in hopes of making them more comfortable, and later escorting them back out again once their appointment is finished. By this point, the clothes are a bit itchy, the gloves more cumbersome than helpful and the mask and goggles sit heavy on his face as non-stop action begins taking its toll. After a very long four-hour shift, and after losing count of how many patients he helped out during that time, he leaves exhausted and mentally drained, but still looking forward to coming back and doing it all over again tomorrow.
It is mid-to-late August of 2020, a week or two after campus has reopened its doors to returning students. Noah Finsterbusch, a medical student at Mississippi State University and student worker during the heights of the pandemic is thrown from the frying pan into the fire as the pandemic continues to evolve; Through it all he shows his ability to keep calm, adapt and grow with each wave that crashes over the health center.
“I wouldn't say I felt overwhelmed with everything going on. It was exactly what I wanted to do. It was my first job involving patients so that was a bit nerve racking, but after the first day I was pretty comfortable with everything,” said Finsterbusch. “I trusted that our COVID-19 protocols would keep me safe.”
Finsterbusch was nurse Nancy Bell’s first hire for the job. The student worker position was created out of need for more help due to the pandemic. She readily agreed with her assistant about the chaotic atmosphere he experienced the first couple months of the pandemic. As a supervisor for all of the student workers, she saw a lot of them get thrown headfirst into the action with the hope that they would learn to swim.
“It was hit the floor and run, ya know?” Bell said with a laugh. “It was, ‘Come on, come with me and I’ll show you how to do it as we go.’ And that was kind of the way it was because of the environment. He wasn’t the only one.”
She was quick to see, though, that Finsterbusch was not only cool under pressure, but thrived, and was willing to take on more work than he already had very quickly in the game.
“I think he’s shown great leadership abilities because he took on helping with, from the very beginning, the hiring process of the student workers, to scheduling their work schedule, which is a difficult thing to do because student workers have short periods, as a rule, of when they can come,” Bell said. “You have to kind of patch them together… I think Noah’s ability to do that… Not everybody can do that. He’s very detailed.”
Serena Liles, a former co-worker and good friend of Finsterbusch’s, had a similar experience while working under him.
“He was technically our boss, but it never felt like he was ordering us to do stuff because he would do it with us, which I feel is a really good demonstration of being a good leader,” said Liles.
The Swiss Army Knife
According to Bell, Finsterbusch started out working under her, helping out with any medical needs, but quickly began taking on other roles such as the scheduling of other student workers, helping out with inventory, working downstairs in the medical records department scanning materials and doing referrals until he just began doing a little bit of everything.
“Even though my title has stayed the same, what I do on a daily basis has probably changed like five or six times… If they need help with something it’s like ‘yeah, let’s get Noah on it and train him on how to do it and he’ll do it,’” said Noah, a fond smile forming on his face as he stares off to his right, bright evening sunshine filtering in through the large window. “The Swiss Army Knife, that’s me. Doesn’t matter what it was, they’ll figure out a way to have me do it.”
And no wonder either, as both Bell and Liles describe Finsterbusch as being adaptable and eager to learn.
Being able to adapt, flourish really, in such an unforgiving environment, like a clinic during a pandemic, can lead to some benefits for those open to working hard and being a helping hand wherever need be. Finsterbusch discovered this as he continued to shift throughout the facility while the pandemic churned within.
“I know what the doctor’s side is going to look like, but at this point I’ve seen the entire clinic operation and what it takes for something like that to run. It’s definitely been an experience I am happy to have,” Finsterbusch said.
Who is he?
Outside of work, Finsterbusch is a die-hard sports lover from Philadelphia, Penn., who says he is living his best life while chilling on the couch with some friends watching an Eagles or Phillies game. Growing up in a single parent household, Finsterbusch, his dad and his brother shared a passionate love for sports, much like the rest of his city, and Finsterbusch has proudly kept up the tradition of planning his days around what games are being played on TV.
After graduating high school, though he loved his hometown, he had an inner desire to spread his wings and so turned his eyes south for the warmer weather. His interest piqued by MSU’s discounted tuition, he was intrigued enough to look into it and ended up really loving the “big school atmosphere.” While here, he made some friends and connections that played a role in steering him towards him position at the LSHC.
After working at the health center for about a year, he became acquainted with Liles after meeting one evening during trivia night, something a lot of the LSHC staff go to. Hitting it off, they eventually began to hang out regularly and became good friends, despite Finsterbusch being Liles’s boss at the time, which apparently wasn’t unusual for him.
“He’s very much a people person, always has been, even at work – he’s friends with everybody in there, even, like, the older people that work there,” Liles said.
It wasn’t hard to figure out how their friendship worked despite their difference in positions and Finsterbusch’s wish to keep his circle small as to avoid accidentally catching the virus from friends or from being out in public; While Finsterbusch caroused through life and job with a happy, unflappable air – Liles describing him as a very “put-together kind of guy” and good under pressure – Liles never lost the opportunity to call him out on his true nature.
“Outside of work, he’s kind of a goofball. He thinks he’s very funny. He’s not as funny as he thinks he is,” Liles said, a grin spreading across her face.
Fighting the good fight
At work, this 22-year-old MSU graduate is driven, focused but still personable. He may be pretty laidback, but he “knows where the line is,” according to Liles, who depicts Finsterbusch as easy to talk to, especially for a boss, but also the one to set the student workers back on track if they start slacking. His integrity and high-achieving attitude is partially what led his boss to hiring more student workers.
“I think he actually proved to us that, you know, we can have student workers and they can be confidential and they can be trustworthy and they can follow through with assignments,” Bell said, after confiding that the LSHC had not really thought to hire students before because they were unsure if students could handle the confidentially needed for the position.
According to Finsterbusch, LSHC were seeing double, if not triple, their normal number of patients per shift and per day, at times. Liles said that they had been seeing extremely high numbers and it was hectic enough to stress out even some of the more experienced medical staff, let alone the student workers who’ve only worked at the clinic for a year or less. Thankfully, they had a boss they could rely on.
“At the height of the pandemic, we were seeing over a hundred patients a day, which is chaotic at best, especially when we only had five or six rooms to put patients in, and so it was very fast paced and Noah was the one who kind of held us together sometimes,” explained Liles. “He was the glue.”
It was frustrating for him and many of the medical staff, though, to see so many patients a day and still be left guessing at how the virus may manifest itself. Each new wave presented differently than the last – the level of susceptibility and severity never quite matching up. This made it difficult for the university to know what mandates to pass to best protect their students as the information on the virus was in constant flux.
“The constant changes in guidance along with the constant changes in what the pandemic was looking like on campus were probably the hardest things to kind of balance. Every single day,” sighed Finsterbusch. “Like, we didn’t know what was gonna happen. Every single day was just different from the day before it.”
The Challenge
Beginning his medical career in the middle of a pandemic, and at the peak of the first wave of the virus, Finsterbusch -- now a graduate and full-time employee at the LSHC -- had been speechless when he heard that the number of university students sent into isolation had maxed out the hotels already booked in Starkville for COVID-positive students.
“Before the wave finally passed as we entered winter, the university filled both of the hotels with COVID patients and exposures, and started to fill a third hotel in Columbus. COVID-19 was rampant when I started and only got worse for the first couple months,” said Finsterbusch.
When the second wave hit, it got even tougher. He recalled the weeks during the peak of the Delta wave where they were seeing high patient counts; During this time, he felt as though they weren’t making any progress at all.
There were good days as well, though. One of Finsterbusch’s most memorable days was from back in March of 2021, when he helped to administer the vaccine at the Humphrey Coliseum, located on the north side of campus.
The third wave began around December of 2021 but, thankfully, this wave proved to be less severe than previous variants and things continued getting better. The mask mandate was even lifted a couple months later in February – except in instructional settings – due to the falling rates of infection, hospitalization and death.
According to Mississippi State testing data, in the last twelve weeks there have been about 172 students and 18 employees that tested positive for COVID-19, and none are in isolation or quarantine. In the last six weeks, active cases have fallen from up to 25 cases a week to almost none. In the last 10 days, 2 active cases have been found – one being a student and the other, an employee of MSU.
Now that the viral pandemic seems to be slowly fading, Finsterbusch reflects upon his time fighting at the frontlines of a microscopic war.
“I feel like if you could handle the pandemic then you can pretty much handle anything,” Finsterbusch said. “The days we had for almost two years straight are more chaotic than probably most days people have had throughout their entire medical careers.”
The Aftermath: Getting back to “normal”
As a worker who joined the force during the beginning of COVID almost two years ago, when everyone was still afraid, still wearing masks, afraid to touch anything or breathe the same air as others, Finsterbusch does not know what “normal” is for the LSHC. Nonetheless, that is what the staff are trying to shift back to by changing back the building layout and protocols as cases begin to bottom out.
“In that way, it’s a little strange, cause it’s getting back to a new normal, but for me, who came in during the pandemic, I’ve never seen what this normal looks like,” said Finsterbusch.
When asked about his future plans and how the pandemic has affected him, he expressed his desire to pursue a career as a doctor and that perhaps the horrors he has come face-to-face with the last couple years will actually help him to achieve that goal.
“My goal is to still be a physician, although the when and the where is still a question I am trying to answer. My goal is to be a compassionate doctor, and I am just letting life take me to wherever it wants to accomplish that goal,” Finsterbusch said. “My time at the Longest Student Health Center would never have happened without the COVID-19 pandemic. The tragedy that is the pandemic has fortunately provided me an opportunity to develop as a student, a worker, and as a person.”
Liles saw proof of that as she worked underneath him. She praised him as being a boss who is driven and purposeful and resilient, but also understanding, caring and humble.
“He knows how to get the job done. He knows how to motivate everybody who is on the team, but he will also do it with a smile on his face,” said Liles.
With so much unique and diverse experience now in his repertoire, Finsterbusch offers up a positive piece of advice, specifically for those going into the medical field, that could honestly work for anyone at any point on any career path:
"So, I would say, the work that you put in, know that it is not unrecognized by your co-workers and the greater community around the university, especially in the health care field; During the pandemic, policy was saying one thing and medicine was saying another, so you didn’t really feel appreciated in terms of what you were doing. There are definitely people out there that are appreciating it, so just know that and don’t lose self-esteem and morale and all that stuff. Just, what you’re doing matters."