<p>What do you think about trying to get a EMT certification while in college. I would think that this would look pretty good when applying to med school but is it even possible to do with the course load of colleges</p>
<p>Sure it’s possible if you know how to manage your time right. There’s a thread about this in one of the stickies so you can look for it in there. Anything that you get involved in and enjoy doing while in college looks good whether it’s having a part time job as an EMT or playing in the university’s band.</p>
<p>Getting your certification doesn’t mean much if you don’t use it.</p>
<p>And taking an EMT class will not be a problem in regard to your courseload. It’ll be a walk in the park compared to your college classes. Seriously, if you have a pulse you’ll pass with ease.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Exactly - everyone and their mothers have an EMT cert in medical school. But many of them have never used it, so it didn’t do jack squat for their application. Now if you get your cert and then go work in an ER or an an ambulance for several years and gain valuable patient care experience, then yeah, its a good thing. A common thing, to be sure, but a good thing.</p>
<p>
Hahaha truth. Just took my first mod 1 test after over-over-over-studying during the weekend… sigh. Well, I’ll never over-study for it again haha.</p>
<p>“Seriously, if you have a pulse you’ll pass with ease.”</p>
<p>“Hahaha truth. Just took my first mod 1 test after over-over-over-studying during the weekend… sigh. Well, I’ll never over-study for it again haha.”</p>
<p>hmm… must vary by course. Most people here don’t do so well in the EMT-B course offered by our CC because of the difficulty of the tests (40-60% attrition rate/class). Our module tests are meant to be like the NREMT and include a lot of trick questions and ambiguous scenarios with multiple choice answers. Being a strong student overall, I did well (i.e., >95% on each exam) but the class average was probably right around 80% with 79.9% being an F and a policy that automatically failed people for failing (<80%) more than a set number of module exams. So, with that in mind, I suspect these classes vary quite a bit in difficulty. The EMT-B class I took was definitely on par with the general physics, chem, and bio courses I took. In general, I remember spending quite a bit more time (and needing to spend that much time) studying for the EMT-B module exams than I did for any other course I was taking at the time (i.e., several of the med school pre-req sciences at my university).</p>
<p>Edit: I should point out, however, that the EMT-B course is a different kind of learning. It’s very much memorization without a whole lot of “reason” to each thing you memorize. In this sense, it is somewhat like bio. Personally, I find problem-based subjects easier to study for quickly b/c you can derive most of what you’ve learned from a few facts. Many pre-meds actually find subjects like bio and EMT-B easier than physics or chemistry because bio and cert courses such as EMT are mostly memorization, whereas g-chem & physics are primarily about learning to solve problems. Personally, I don’t really like long lists of procedures without reason, so EMT made more sense to me when I went beyond the text and considered the why of those lists of procedures – e.g., why you do a physical exam first (in the secondary assessment) on an unresponsive medical pt (that’s a pretty simple, straightforward one, of course).</p>
<p>FYI, Acceptd, if I recall correctly and your course is anything like mine, your 2nd module exam will see a drop in grades. I believe my class generally saw about a 5-10% drop despite their harder studying for the 2nd module.</p>
<p>Oh wow, Apumic. They must definitely vary then. My instructor said that historically speaking, the first test usually had the lowest average out of all of the mods. We will actually probably discuss the class average and whatnot during tomorrow’s lecture which should be interesting to hear, but I doubt it would be all that low. I got a 98 because the questions were relatively simple compared to the depth of information I was studying, especially with respect to anatomy. </p>
<p>You’re definitely right though by saying that the course involves a lot of memorization. And I agree that understanding WHY you do certain procedures makes it easier than just simply memorizing steps.</p>
<p>Yeah, it sounds like it. Nice job on the 98, btw.
As I recall, our test questions tended to be a bit weird at times. For example, they’d give a scenario and then ask about an aspect of it w/ an ambiguous answer. For example, a question might ask about the use of vitals in a given scenario (w/o Hx) that clearly indicates the development of shock (i.e., pale/clammy skin, high pulse, low BP) and then give you options of “A. These vitals indicate she is severely ill” or “B. These vitals would be useful for trending” and then two other answers that are definitely wrong. Technically, the answer they’d want to that question would be B because technically A could be called a diagnosis (even though it’s pretty clear it’s shock and, personally, I generally consider shock to be a fairly severe illness). At the same time, at least to me, B is a given and need not be said (therefore, I am personally likely to overlook it as an option, in favor of actually doing something with that trend; trending is second-nature to me, so why would be on a test, you know?). So one thing I had to learn in that EMT class was not to overthink the problem and instead try to think at the level of someone with no training beyond the EMT-B candidate. That’s one area I could see a lot of other premeds struggling in as well since many are very bright individuals and likely to think problems through to a much higher level than the average EMT student.</p>
<p>That’s interesting Apumic… but why do they make the class so hard? It seems quite unnecessary to me, seeing as how EMS (at the EMT-B level) boils down to ABCs, 90% of the time.</p>
<p>GS, not sure… I think the idea is probably to weed people out. (Which, to be honest, since I’m considering the possibility of going into EM, I actually wish they’d weed them out even more, although I’m not so sure academically is the best way of doing that.) I also know they pride themselves on having a high pass-rate for the NREMT-B exam. Ultimately, though, I agree that since the EMT-B’s scope of practice is basically glorified First Aid/CPR/O2/AED (sorry to all the fellow EMT-Bs out there), we probably don’t need ambiguously-worded test questions and such to differentiate the good EMT-B candidates from the bad. I certainly had a conversation with the program coordinator about it because I didn’t feel it was likely to develop the best possible EMS personnel, but she liked her exams the way they were, so she basically thanked me for the input and continued on with the same curriculum as far as I know.</p>