Money, The Motivation Behind getting a higher education?


As a college student, money is pretty much on my mind 24 hours a day seven days a week. In reality that is the main reason that I chose to further my education in hopes that I could earn a better living than my parents did. Eventually I plan to take my EMT training as far as I possibly can and become a registered nurse.

One of my mother’s friends has been a registered nurse for 13 years and earns an average annual salary of about $82,000 per year. My best friend Dave is attending DeVry University to earn an associate’s degree as a medical laboratory technician. I’m sure after he has completed his first two years and sees how much the salary can increase with a bachelor’s degree, am sure he will opt to attend school for further training.

I know his annual salary will be decent when he graduates from college, probably about $32,000 per year to start off. One of the reasons that he even started to attend Devry university is because his uncle works for the government as a lab technician. He has been doing it for about 18 years and he said his average lab technician salary is over $70,000 per year. $70,000 per year is enough motivation for me to do a job that I don’t even think I would like or enjoy doing.

Dave’s uncle told him that there is such a high demand for big a lab technician that they expect the average income for a technician to actually increase almost yearly because of demand. That’s the kind of job security that everyone should be looking for. In the medical field, you are almost guaranteed that you will always have a job. As long as people are getting sick and getting hurt there will be a need for EMTs, nurses and all kinds of different technicians. Pretty much any technician salary will be more than fair, even in today’s poor economy.

Take it from me, who has heard first-hand from my best friends local pursuing a technical career is definitely worth the time and effort that it takes to earn either a certificate or a degree. College courses are not all boring, hard and no fun. Many teachers and professors go out of their way to make learning a fun experience for all students involved. If you get the chance and thinking about going back to school, stop thinking about it and make it a reality.

More Schooling Passed my EMT Classes?


Being here at Community college have made several new friends, and even hang out with some old friends who live in my same neighborhood that I grew up with. At lunch today one of my friends mentioned some classes and programs that he was taking to get his radiology technician degree, and I noticed that several were similar to some classes I have to take my EMT certification.

I know that I can get a job within six months of taking my EMT course, and going after a radiology technician degree requires a bit more schooling and some more classes, however since they are both similar to each other and the fact that they are in the medical field, I was extremely shocked when he told me how much he thought he would be making with the graduated from school.

Being an EMT, I think I would be happy if my average yearly salary capped out at maybe $42,000 a year however, when I heard that he would be making close to 40,000 a year as soon as he graduated from college I started to rethink why I was in college and if I would really be happy as an EMT. We are both going to the same community college, and he will graduate about a year later than I will. When he graduates, he will be making good money right away and can make up to $66,000 per year if not more. I never thought that a radiology tech salary would be quite that good.

Now I hate to sound like someone who is going after a college degree strictly for the money, because that is not the kind of person I am. However, if I can go back to school for about another year and a half and add $20,000 per year on my annual salary working in a similar field, I don’t see any reason to think that I’m being selfish to go back to school for extra money.

So I guess what I’m saying is, that I will continue my EMT schooling and then go out and get a job as fast as I possibly can. And EMT schedule is extremely flexible and should give me ample time to go to night school or just take part-time classes until I can earn my degree as a radiology technician. Who knows though, I may be extremely happy with my job as an EMT and not even want to go back to school to learn anything else. Maybe, just maybe, I’ll even finish my EMT schooling and not be able to pass my final exam to be certified as an EMT. I guess only time will tell.

EMT Class Story


emtDo you like mysteries?  Do you want to hear about a murder? Well I’m an E.M.T. student in college,  and do I have a mystery for you.
There I was sitting in class my instructor was sitting at his desk giving us his boring lecture on trauma patient assessment, but then he breaks with the speech  and then turns to the class and says; I have a patient assessment for you, and he says let me tell you all a little story.

One night about 2:00am I was lying in my bed at the station. When all at once the alarm sounds, and we all get out of our beds to respond to the call. My partner and I are the ones assigned to the call. Dispatch tells us that there is an elderly woman who is suffering from chest pains, and her daughter and son-in-law are on scene.  We asked if there was any other information on the patient? Dispatch responds and tells us no, ten minutes later we arrive on scene.

We pulled up to a house that was very run down. This woman runs out the door toward us screaming and crying. We could not make sense of what she was saying, but my partner and i run into the house anyway, where we found the patient lying on the floor. The son-in-law was trying to perform CPR. Her pupils were enlarged and she had excessive drooling and no heart beat. We now had a load-an-go patient; we put her in the ambulance where our registered respiratory therapist worked hard to revive her while we were on route to the hospital.

The daughter came with us in the ambulance and she was sitting quite nervously on the bench. I noticed she seemed to draw a lot of attention to her hands. She looked as if she was trying to rub something off. She would also look down and hide her hands in her lap every time I looked at her. She seemed very nervous and paranoid. I continued giving the patient oxygen and chest compressions, but she was not recovering, she was to far gone to do anything else. The heart monitor flat lined.

We arrived at the hospital to late to do anything else. We asked the officer that was on scene where the son-in-law was? I don’t know! He said. I asked the daughter where her husband was. She said, I don’t know, he was on his way! We called dispatch to have an officer go back to the scene. It was now 3:30am and I had a really bad feeling, no good was going to come out of this.

Finally the officer calls us back and say’s you have another patient get back here now! We raced back to that same house only to find the officer looking at the dead body of the daughter’s husband. He had the same drooling and dilated pupils, the same as before, what could have happened to both these people I wondered. We called the hospital to check on the daughter, the nurse said; we have some bad news. What kind of bad news I said? The nurse replied; that young lady that came with you on the ambulance, she’s dead. I could not believe my ears, what happened! She fell out the forth story window.
To this day the instructor said, I will never know who the victim was, and who the murderer was. He looked up at all of us and said, do you still want to be an E.M.T?