working on the ambulance in the hospital you're exposed to operating rooms where you're doing innovations you're doing you're helping deliver babies paramedics have the ability to administer medications and there are some als advanced life support skills that we learn that we are authorized to do in the field big responsibility to carry a lot of pride goes into what we do i'm alger swingley i'm a 2021 graduate from the paramedic program here at great falls college yeah looking back

i was challenged with math because it had been many years since i'd done math classes and i'd never had a base of algebra so i actually withdrew from the program after one semester i took a year off a year and a half and i really wanted to get the paramedic degree so i came back to the college and i took mathematics and i took biology and i got a lot of help at the academic success center and had a lot of support from the faculty that supported me through that path of math and science and i feel that they

gave me extra time whatever time i wanted to put in they were willing to give me and it helped they gave me an award which i hardly believed i deserved but they gave me the math student of the year award and that was a very big honor for me coming from very little math background to excelling in math to that level and it helped in my paramedic program then i was accepted again into the program in fall of 2020 in the classroom was very interesting very challenging i was in a class size of eight people who all

graduated from the program with a degree and they were varied in age from i believe 19 years old right out of high school to middle age to almost elderly so it was a very challenging group a very supportive group of students it was quite a pleasure to be selected the paramedic student of the year the um i was selected by my peers my classmates and we teased back and forth a fair amount but um they told me that i had worked extra hard and that i deserved that honor and it was it was an honor paramedics are in high demand

locally statewide nationally and wages are coming up in that field and you can pretty much write your own ticket