I thought that I would post this here as I consider many of you here friends even though I've only met a few of you in person...
I will be going to the St Louis County Police Academy in February!
To give everyone a little background info about me, I'm 30 years old and spent 4 years in the Marine Corps infantry. I joined in Jan 93, (scored a 96 on the Armed Services Vocational Appititude Battery, ASVAB for short...basically tells the military what your strong points are and gives them an indication of what job you'd be best suited for. Top score is a 99), and actually waited 10 months to go in the infantry. you should have seen the look on the recruiters face I told him I was going infantry or not at all....
At any rate, I really enjoyed my stint in the Corps, it taught me alot about myself, and I got to see the world, and work w/ fantastic people, (and some incredibly dumb ones too. Pretty sure I met the guy who's the reason we still have instructions on shampoo...
). I decided to get out when my enlistment was up after 4 years because I knew that an education was going to be important. The intent at that time was to go to school, get a degree, go back in the Corps as an officer, and be a pilot. While in college, I enrolled in the Platoon Leaders Course which is basically boot camp for officers. That was fun, but made realize that what I was looking for in a career, (constant challenges, variation of daily activities, physical effort, strong mental challenge and satisfaction, working in a variety of environments, not just indoors) I could find elsewhere and wouldnt have me traipsing all over the globe for indeterminant periods of time, ( I would like to have a family, and thats really tough when you can get sent to the gulf for 9 months to a year w/o a whole lot o notice. Been there , done that w/ girlfriends and that didnt really work well.) I did really well in OCS, (#3 out of 500 candidates...would've been #2 if I hadnt had an infected foot), but decided to resign from the program, and look elsewhere. I ran into a friend of mine who is a firefighter/paramedic and he knew I also enjoyed helping people, but needed something challenging, and rewarding. So he started talking about the fire dept. I liked what I heard, (good pay in some districts...75-80 K a year for working 10 days a month...not a bad part time job! Keep in mind that those 10 days a month are 24 hour days so firefighter/paramedics are actually pulling 240 hours a month as opposed to 160 hours a month that an 8 hour day/40 hour a week worker pulls...), and your helping people, while doing something challenging and rewarding. So I went about trying to get a job in a fire dept. Well...thats pretty tough, alot of who knows who and nepotism going on there, so I needed to get my Paramedic license to make myself more marketable. I worked hard and got accepted into the Paramedic program at a local community college that actually has one of the best Paramedic courses in the entire state. There were 56 people applying for 25 slots, I made the cut and started my classes last August. Its a lengthy intensive course that starts in August and ends the following year around September depending on how your clinicals go and if you pass the national registry examinations. I enjoyed the classes, and I enjoyed the detective aspect of finding out what was really happening to people when they were hurt, but the downtime at the firehouses was horrible! On many field clinicals that I was on (riding along w/ an ambulance for the purposes of applying learned skills in the field on real patients, while being supervised by trained medics w/ many years of experiance) we would get maybe 3 or 4 calls in a 14 hour period. Keep in mind that the ambulance runs more calls the then firetrucks do on average. And alot of those calls were for crap like the patient stepped on a nail an wanted an ambulance to take them to the hospital. Or the person calling the ambulance had a fever....of 100....
Just an FYI...If its not a life threatening situation, meaning someone is going to die w/o medical care, an ambulance isnt necessary. If you can take yourself to the hospital, you should. Leave the ambulance for car crashes, heart attacks, shootings, etc.....just my two cents...
Anyway, I wanted to help people, but in more of a proactive way than a reactive manner. Besides I caught myself hoping that the calls we were going on were gonna be good, meaning somebody would be seriously hurt. And thats a crappy feeling....
So I submitted an application to the police dept, and I got accepted. I feel that this will actually fit my personality and attitude much better than a career in Emergency Medical Services would. There are many other positive aspects of this decisions, but this post is already wayyy to long, so I'll stop there. I just wanted to tell everyone the good news. Wit wont be the only comedian w/ a badge here soon!
Nick