Effect essay

I have been a paramedic for fifteen years. I received my training at the now defunked Maine EMS Academy at Kennebec Valley Technical College, graduating in 1995. The program ran for twenty years and was touted as the best paramedic school in the northeast. It was the only full-time paramedic training in Maine but unfortunately was shut down in 2005 due to lack of funding. This program was a fantastic program to attend and has turned out some of the best paramedics in the state. Some of the reasons why it was such a good program were that it was highly selective in who it accepted, very high academic standard and an extremely passionate and knowledgeable instructor.

I had been a Basic EMT for several years and had come to the realization that if I wanted to be a career firefighter I needed to be a paramedic. I knew the program was very selective and after the initial application process, applicants had to have an agonizing interview with the instructor and a seasoned paramedic. I had been told that students were selected for several reasons but usually you did not see more than one student from any one geographical area. Students were taken from all over Maine and the Maritimes because Canada's nearest paramedic school was in Montreal. The first day of class the instructor let it be known that there were twenty or thirty people on the waiting list. He said in no uncertain terms that if any one of us was not committed 100% to the class, that now was the time to get out so others may take our spot. Everyone was hand picked by the instructor for various political or geographical reasons. Some were accepted into the program simply because they came from an area where there were a lot of paramedics from another program and our instructor wanted his class to have a presence in that area. At the time I was living in Thomaston, was in my early 20's, and this was good because I really didn't have much going on and there were not many paramedics in the area let alone from this program.

The instructor told us, on the first day, that he had a much higher standard than any other similar program out there. He wasn't kidding. The class consisted full days of classroom lecture on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and clinical rotations Tuesdays, and Thursdays, for the first semester. Second and third semesters were clinical rotations on Mon.,Wed., Fri., and classroom on Tues., and Thurs. At the end of the ten months of class we were to do an internship for two weeks, one in Hartford, Connecticut and the other in Rochester, New York. It was a very time consuming class and required lots of travel for clinical rotations. Clinicals were in Portland, Bangor, Lewiston, Waterville, and Augusta, which combined with travel time and studying made for very short nights. This was only part of what made this program harder than most others. The standard minimum passing grade for most public safety classes is 70%, in this program it was 80%. We had fifty question quizzes every week and the average exam was two hundred and fifty questions and took about four hours to complete. The national requirements for a paramedic class is one thousand hours, five hundred clinical and five hundred didactic. This program was over twenty five hundred hours.

Now the instructor, he came into the room on the first day and said “My name is Paul Plummer and I have bachelors degrees in Philosophy and Theology and I currently working on a bachelors in Microbiology, and this will be the hardest class you have ever had.” Paul was from Mass. and had been a Basic EMT in Boston for a couple of years in the late 1970's before going to paramedic school. He had worked as a paramedic in New York City for six or seven years in the eighties. Now that is the big time, the majors of the EMS world. At the time violent crime was on the rise in NYC , heroin still in full swing and crack was starting to grab hold. Just by saying he worked in New York at that time I knew he had been there, done that, and had the t-shirt. He is a very intense man and was passionate about making sure that he turned out good paramedics. He had seen over his time the damage a poorly trained and educated paramedic could do. There were no half measures with Paul, you either knew the answer to a question or you didn't, and that was it.   He had memorized his lesson plan and often would not look at for house because he knew the information cold. You knew where you stood with Paul and he was the kind of guy that would not sugar coat things at all. If you screwed up, you knew it immediatly, and there was no question what you did wrong. But if someone else screwed up and tried to blame one of his students, he would fight to the death to make sure his students looked good.

That was fifteen years ago, and the program no longer exists. That's to bad because it did turn out some great paramedics, many of which I work with today. At the end of the class, when we did out internship in Rochester, the ambulance company we were riding with tried to recruit all of us and offered double signing bonuses because as they said, we were on a different level than any paramedics graduating in upstate New York. That says a lot about the caliber of paramedics that came out of that class. It was the hardest class I have ever taken and I am very glad I made it through. I feel that I am fortunate to have been through that program because I think it made a better paramedic that the other programs offered then and now. Because I got into one of the most selective programs around, being made to meet a higher standard, and a great instructor, I know that I have received the best training possible in my field.