Ambulances, ambulances, ambulances

I hate needles. They are just no fun. I nearly always faint and when I was little I would throw a tantrum, have to be held down and then sometimes faint. Tomorrow I may have to have zillions of them. I will probably have nightmares tonight.

The reason for all this is that I have my first immunisation appointment for uni tomorrow, out at good old Frankston. Given that placement starts in mid March (!!!) us darling paramedic students' immune systems need to be immune against anything the unwashed public might expose us to. I must admit the immunisation requirements have brought me face to face with the "dirty strangers" reality of the course I'm about to take. Thankfully my parents are not the anti-vaccine idiot hippy types, so I've received all the vaccinations a person of my age should have. So I should only need the zillions of additional boosters required for healthcare students but not required for normal people. Yippee. 

Getting into Paramedics has been an amusing experience. As most of you would already know, my original post Arts degree plan was law but I recent experiences with the field of law have put me off. Three law offers and a late-ish change of preferences saw me stumble upon paramedics. 

I didn't chose paramedics the traditional way people chose what course they want to do. All the traditional decision making methods pointed toward law, which was great except for the part where I don't want to do law right now. I knew I wanted to do more student and with only an Arts degree, the workforce didn't seem like an attractive option.

I loved my Arts degree but I found the whole student experience to be lacking. I foolishly spent most of my time on the Monash Caulfield Campus, due to its proximity to home, away from the relative liveliness of Monash Clayton. Caulfield campus does not have any clubs or interest groups targeted at domestic students and because it is a smaller campus, there are simply fewer people and fewer places for people to hang out.  The contact hours of Arts are extremely low. Even while doing an overload in my final semester I only had 11 hours on campus. Many Arts students love that part but I found that I had too much spare time that I didn't use very productively. Also, Arts at Monash has a huge cohort so I barely saw the same people more than once across semesters, if they bothered to turn up at all. I loved what I was learning, but I didn't the barely existent on-campus element terribly engaging. 

When I set out to look for a course for 2012 these were my criteria:

• High/er contact hours
• Employ-ability - course where I would "be something" at the end (e.g. teacher, doctor, psychologist etc).
• More than just essays - after 3 years of nothing but essays, I wanted something where I would learn "real life" skills and solve problems that had a definite "answer".
• Something I was eligible for  (duh) - based on my secondary and tertiary grades and subjects.

Criteria one may seem strange, but I am so much happier and healthier when I am busy and have a structured life. Arts taught that having hours of structure-less, self-directed time is a recipe for getting seriously lost in my own head. When Katie started uni I was jealous that she seemed to always be on the go and have so much more to do with her studies. First year paramedics has 24hours on-campus per week, which is double the amount of campus contact than I had in first year Arts.

The second criteria came from the constant agonising about how directionless my life seemed to have become. You can learn a lot from an Arts degree, but it doesn't make you terribly employable. The closer I got to realising that I didn't want to do law next, the more I began to freak out. Feeling like you are going nowhere in life is terrifying and it was something I worried about to the point where I lost sleep over it. This is why I wanted a course that would qualify me to be a specifically skilled professional; certainty and a clear direction.

Writing is something that I get a lot of joy out of but I started to feel like, academically, I had abilities that were going to waste. Spending three years focusing only on humanities didn't seemed very balanced. There is also a great deal of beauty in systematically approaching a problem that has an unambiguously correct answer when solved. The pharmacological and biological elements of paramedics will cater to this and the focus on life saving clinical skills are about as "real life" as it gets. 

Eligibility was a bit factor in selecting my course for this year. Having good grades from my degree were helpful, the fact that I did a maths and a science at year 12 level was equally so. The fact that the maths wasn't a difficult one and the fact that the science was biology and not chemistry rendered me ineligible for some courses I was also considering. For non-year 12 applicants, paramedics at Monash required any year 12 maths, a year 12 score of 80 or above and a tertiary average of a credit or better. Thankfully, I met or exceeded all these requirements. 

My generation is predicted to have an absurd amount of career changes in our working lives.  So for me, choosing to study paramedics has been more about the kind of lifestyle and experiences I want to have in 2012, rather than what I want to do career wise in the long term. I can see myself being a paramedic, but I wouldn't be surprised if it is a starting point to a long and varied working life.

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