This past fall, I lost my job. As a tenured full professor at a state university, that is not a sentence I ever thought I would write. I study higher education, and I live in the state with the lowest public funding for its colleges, so I understood—in the abstract—that I was caught in a net that is pulling many of us out of the work we love. But understanding the context didn’t help much. I was grieving the loss of my colleagues, my students, and the community I had taught inside for more than a quarter century. Mostly, I was grieving the loss of my vocation.
A week into my jobless new life, for reasons I can’t fully explain (although a multiday binge of The Pitt may have had something to do with it), I got in my car and drove to my town’s fire station.
I’ve always been drawn to emergency medicine. As a kid, I trailed my mother through the hospital where she worked as a nurse, and then later I spent a decade as her primary caregiver after she’d suffered a stroke and a cascading series of medical crises in her final years. I knew what it meant to need someone who knew what to do. I walked into the fire station and asked the chief whether they needed any additional EMTs.
He asked about my background. I told him I’d been a professor. “Of what—nursing? Biology? Health?” Early American literature was not the answer he expected. But there was an intensive EMT class just starting up, and if I passed it and the arduous licensing exam, he said I’d be welcome to serve on the on-call team. I signed up that day.
What followed was the most unlikely—and most instructive—learning experience of my life.
Irrelevance is a gift.
I have spent 30 years straining to make course material feel relevant to my students. So it was genuinely startling to notice how completely absorbed I was in a subject that had nothing to do with my professional expertise or career goals. I wasn’t premed. I wasn’t changing fields. I was learning solely because I wanted to—and that desire, it turned out, was an engine powerful enough to carry me through anything.
Curiosity can be a privilege, and I don’t want to universalize this story. Students facing financial pressure, family obligation, or high professional stakes can’t simply be told to enjoy learning for its own sake. But I think there’s something here worth sitting with: A student taking a general education course far outside their major may actually be standing at a rare threshold—the chance to learn without the weight of utility pressing down on them. What if we, as educators, leaned into that instead of rushing to justify every course in terms of outcomes and career readiness? What if we explicitly framed the “irrelevant” course as a key to unlocking the most valuable kind of learning?
What I found in my “irrelevant” EMT studies was the joy of learning itself—and with it the discovery that I can learn literally anything. Knowledge is a gift we can give ourselves anytime we decide to engage.
Learning is a vocation.
When I lost my job, I also lost my sense of purpose. Teaching had been the way I felt useful in the world—the mechanism through which I believed I was having an impact. Without it, I wasn’t sure who I was.
What I didn’t expect was that learning could deliver that sense of meaning right back.
As I worked through the EMT curriculum, something shifted. The more I understood about the human body—its intricate, improbable complexity—the more I wanted to understand. Curiosity, it turns out, compounds. Throughout all my years of formal learning, from primary school to my PhD, I hadn’t so fully inhabited my own curiosity the way that I did during this off-track experience. And with the curiosity came something that felt like hope: a private sense that there was a future version of me with more to offer than the present one and a more public sense that this kind of transformation, multiplied across many learners, could make the world different—and possibly better.
I feel lucky that I now have a new position in higher education and lucky, too, that I can hold it alongside my spot on the local on-call EMT team. As I step back into the world of teaching with a new perspective, I wonder whether maybe I had gently misperceived my life’s calling. Maybe it wasn’t teaching but learning that was my vocation all along.
Robin DeRosa is the executive director of the Open Education Network, an organization based at the University of Minnesota that helps colleges and universities center equity, access, affordability, and learner agency in their academic programs. She is also an emergency medical technician with her town’s fire department.
