After the experience of EMT and Organic Chemistry
By Ally Siffringer UA’28 and Jim Stellar
The title says it all. This blog is about combining the two pieces of a successful undergraduate career. The first is (obviously) clinical experience. Some have said being an EMT is like working in a traveling emergency room. You meet people on what can be the worst day of their life and try to apply stabilizing medical practice to get them to the hospital. AS is an EMT and is part of the University at Albany EMT program called Five Quad. The second part of the title is perhaps the most famous premed weed-out course in any university. Oddly, JS took this course long ago when he was premed before switching to neuroscience research. AS is in it now in the beginning of a year-long sequence of two courses, and it has not changed in this way since JS took it.
I (AS) have been lucky enough to experience a summer of EMT class filled with hands-on learning and clinical hours. It was tiring at times but all worth it in the end. Five Quad fueled my drive to become an EMT; with the basic training I received from them, I gathered the confidence to enroll in an EMT class back home in Buffalo. Once back in Albany, I took my state written exam (which I passed!) and am now a New York state certified EMT. As I continue my volunteer work with Five Quad and search for an EMS job outside of UAlbany, I acquire clinical experience which has fed my drive to not only help people, but learn each day. Every call I respond to teaches me something new; whether I learn from a fellow EMT, a paramedic, or even my patient, I take each lesson into account and apply it in future scenarios.
Academically, I have also found myself taking some difficult courses. One of which being the infamous organic chemistry. As a student who is unsure whether they’d like to go pre-med or not, organic chemistry is a required course and often the downfall of many pre-medders. I’m currently 6 weeks into one of two organic chemistry semesters and I’ve found myself (surprisingly) not hating it.
I’ve also found myself researching labs here on UAlbany’s campus and in my home town of Buffalo at UBuffalo. My hope is to join a laboratory next semester. As an EMT I have the clinical experience needed as a pre-med student, but I’m missing the how and why behind it all – the basic science behind medicine. With the resources available on campus, I’m excited to explore my options and learn more about the research side of academia.
Let’s step back a bit and examine the fundamental question – How does one decide between medical school and a career in research from going to graduate school? We talked about this, and as noted previously in other blogs JS changed from premed to preresearch in his senior year of college under the influence of a faculty mentor. And it has worked out. AS is on the horns of this dilemma. So how does one decide?
While there is no answer, there is an approach. It is the one pushed here in this blog and that is to get experience. AS has the EMT experience. She needs the science laboratory experience. Why? The feeling of working as an EMT agrees with her, but she does not know about the feeling of doing biomedical or neuroscience research that could potentially underlie a medical treatment. Consider that EMTs carry Narcan and give it to people overdosing from fentanyl or other opiates so they do not stop breathing and die. That treatment and the understanding of what it does came from basic research and started in a lab, probably with rats or mice. So, the question is, what will AS feel when she works in that kind of lab? And, how will it compare to what she already knows about medical treatment from being an EMT?
Those decisions come down to feelings and the feelings can emerge somewhat from imagining, reading, taking classes. But to really get that feeling strongly one has to put one’s hands on something – equipment, mice, chemicals, etc. – and see how it feels inside. One has to be present with other people. And maybe talk about it with with someone like a mentor.
This process of feeling and then bringing that feeling to planning is what Daniel Kahneman called System 1 (heuristics – feeling for the decision) vs System 2 (deliberative planning). It is what we call here as cognitive (neocortex) – emotional (limbic system) integration. The problem is that the cognitive and emotional systems communicate, but not completely. You know completely how to give directions step-by-step. But the feeling behind cognitive judgment is a bit more mysterious in how it communicates that value judgement to the cognitive plan (i.e. a career choice). That is why one has to immerse oneself in the experience to get the important full effect.
We will return to write about how it turns out.
