Noah Weaver works at St. Luke's ER
Myra Saturen,
“I feel that a life of meaning is a life dedicated to the service of others,” says Noah Weaver, a Spring 2019 graduate of Northampton Community College (NCC) with a degree in biological science. He is serving others during one of the greatest crises the world has known: the coronavirus pandemic. As an emergency technician at St. Luke’s Hospital, Fountain Hill, Bethlehem, he is caring for many patients, including those infected with the coronavirus.
Weaver is a lifelong resident of the Lehigh Valley whose mother is the prenatal education coordinator for St. Luke’s, having also been a labor and delivery nurse there. Seeing the satisfaction his mother had knowing that she helped people inspired Noah to set a goal of serving others.
So he enrolled at NCC, attending part-time while working as an operations manager at a CVS. After about a year of part-time study, he left his job to pursue what he felt was most important, his education. After graduating from NCC, he transferred on a nearly-full scholarship to Lehigh University. “I am incredibly grateful for being able to do so, and I whole-heartedly say that it wouldn’t have happened without the initial opportunities provided to me by Northampton Community College.”
Weaver describes working at St. Luke’s during the pandemic. “It is definitely an eerie feeling: you know that people are a bit on edge, but I would say that the majority of my colleagues, including myself, are simply treating it with a heightened sense of awareness. However, this is not to be confused with panicking. Quite the contrary, I believe that the overwhelming majority of my colleagues are collected when it comes to treating patients, whether they have COVID-19 or not.”
Weaver has chosen medicine as a career. “What inspires me the most,” he says, “is having the feeling of having a ‘higher calling’.” I have a strong sense of duty to my community to serve the public. I am a big proponent of “servant leadership”, a life devoted to serving people.
Having had multiple roadblocks in his life, including nearly failing high school, Weaver knows that not everyone has an easy set of life circumstances, a realization that makes him work ever harder for those who need help the most.
“The coronavirus has only strengthened my commitment to go into medicine,” Weaver says. “It’s not for everybody, but there is a sense of medicine being a higher calling for me. It is filled with impact, meaning and a whole lot of other things in between. I live every day knowing that life is a gift, and I intend to make the most of it.”
