Midwifery School
I first played around the idea with becoming a midwife in 2012 and went to an info session at SUNY Downstate. The list of prerequisites was so long that I walked away knowing that it would take me over a year. The Certified Professional Midwife pathway appealed to me immensely, but CPMs were not, and continue not to be licensed in New York State. After that, in the following years, I took several prenatal yoga teacher trainings and doula trainings, became a childbirth educator and lactation consultant, and even a midwifery assistant training at The Farm. I also founded and built Love Child to become a full support space for expecting and new parents.
As birth centers began to close in New York City (we lost the Bellevue birth center, the Mt Sinai Birth Center and St Vincents within a decade, with no replacements) I looked at pursuing midwifery school again with the hope of opening a birth center. A new law that allowed midwives to open birth centers had just passed. I went back to SUNY Downstate’s information session, however, a year of pre-requisite courses were required just to apply to the program. I went to the Columbia info session, but I left half-way through because there was more emphasis on the sim-lab models than real people. I finally resigned myself to looking outside NYC and was impressed by the info session at Yale and the sample class I attended. They claimed their program was for second-career, later stage, students and hence didn’t require prerequisites. I applied and got in and accepted by Feb 2020.
Of course, 2020 turned out to be so much different than we all thought. I hinged my acceptance to Yale with the assurances from the school of their covid testing, contact tracing and quarantine policies. Our classes were all online, except for our clinical training. While other classes had online clinical training opportunities, ours were in person, in hospitals around Connecticut. What my classmates and I soon also learned was that clinical training was not subject to the same rigorous covid precautions as students were. As a result we were treated like (unpaid) hospital employees who lacked access to N-95s and were working in a setting without the same rigorous contact tracing, quarantine or weekly testing requirements.
Students had multiple exposures to covid, and were still expected to come back to clinical without quarantining. In addition, as most new classes at Yale have found, incidents of racism pervaded the atmosphere from use of racial slurs, to discrimination and attacks against students of color. It was during this time that our DEI Director resigned with a mic-drop of an email that should have made headlines. I also accepted admission to Yale with assurances that the school could help me navigate clinical training sites in NYC and in India. I had identified sites where I had close relationships and would be willing to have me, However, I found that the office responsible was not very responsive to my inquiries. I couldn’t see myself continuing to learn what I wanted to, in such a setting, all while commuting to New Haven.
In July 2021, I applied and was admitted to the midwifery program at Thomas Jefferson University, an asynchronous online program based in Philadelphia. After getting my associate nursing degree from Yale, and passing the NCLEX in August, I transferred and started my midwifery training at TJU.
After a year on online classes, I was able to start and complete my intrapartum and gyn clinical training in NYC with a group of midwives with whom I had long standing relationship with, and whom I had referred and shared clients with at Love Child, as well as a midwife in Brooklyn’s private practice. I was thrilled to learn these skills from and with New Yorkers. This year, I have started my intrapartum training at a birth center in my hometown in India. Both these opportunities would not have been possible without the strong relationships I already had with the midwives at these sites, and with support and willingness from TJU. I did have to do a lot of background work to make an international clinical training possible, but I’m glad to have molded my midwifery student journey to be the right fit for me.
