It was my second day on the volunteer EMS unit, and we got dispatched to an older gentleman who fell in the bathroom. When we arrived at the scene, we discovered the patient fell because his heart had stopped. The responding crews and I immediately began life-saving measures such as CPR, AED placement, definitive airway placement, and advanced cardiac drugs. After roughly ten minutes, the battalion chief yelled for everyone to stop and check a pulse. I placed my fingers on the patient’s carotid pulse and felt the faint surge of blood go past my fingers. The euphoria that I felt when I realized I was part of saving someone’s life was the best feeling I had felt in my life. Shortly after the patient had regained a pulse, we rushed him to the hospital, and he ended up surviving. After my second day as a volunteer EMT, my life was changed forever. The impact I was able to make as a healthcare professional was incredible, and that was the type of impact I wanted to make every day for the rest of my life. Every day when I came home from work, I knew that I made a positive impact on someone’s life, and that feeling of happiness was something I wanted forever. As I continued my career as an EMT, I realized that I wanted to help more than my current scope of practice allowed, so my focus became to be a high-level provider such as a doctor, nurse practitioner, or physician assistant. After various shadowing opportunities and discussions with my guidance counselors, I found the position of physician assistant as the perfect fit for me.

Community involvement has always been a staple in my life. Since a young age, I have been involved in the community whether that was picking up trash on the beach or helping package meals for the hungry. At a young age, community involvement was a requirement at school, but as I got involved I realized how good it felt to meet new people and help others. Once I was a bit older and could drive on my own, I started getting involved with local community programs like Habitat for Humanity, Miracle Fields, and youth basketball clinics. It was amazing to see the impact I could have by doing small tasks such as digging a foundation, pushing someone in a wheelchair around the bases, or teaching a young kid how to shoot a basketball properly. As I grew older and became more skilled in basketball and in my education, my ability to help others continued to grow as well. Throughout my college career, I volunteered with different programs including being a tutor with the Boys and Girls Club, A Touch of a Father’s Love Ministry and Food Pantry, and holding youth basketball summer camps. However, my most rewarding community involvement I have done is joining the rescue squad where I was able to literally save people’s lives and help educate people in the community on how to keep themselves safe and healthy. I experienced some very tough scenes in my time as an EMT, but there was no better feeling than coming home and knowing the impact that I made every day. I am currently volunteering as a youth basketball coach to try and pass down the important life lessons that I learned through basketball. I have always been involved in the community to try and help others, but as I look back my community involvement has done so much for me. Through all of my community involvement, it has created lifelong relationships and great connections, gave me a new perspective on life, and developed both social and physical skills. I have met some of my closest friends through my various community activities and those relationships still continue to this day. I have also made great connections through my community involvement. I was volunteering at a youth day at one of our college football games and one of the parents of the children that I was playing with came up to meet me. This sparked a conversation about what my plans were in the upcoming years and she ended up helping me find an internship with a doctor that semester. If I had not stepped out into the community, that connection never would have been created. One of the biggest things community involvement has taught me is to appreciate the little things. In my time with the Miracle Fields, which was a baseball organization for special needs children, I learned to appreciate the ability to play sports and even be able to walk everyday. Through volunteering at A Touch of a Father’s Love and Ministry and Food Pantry, I gained an appreciation for being able to have a meal on the table every night, which many of the people I served did not. I feel that my community involvement changed my attitude on life forever to appreciate all the little things. The last way that community involvement helped me was it taught me social and physical skills. Through my community involvement, I have learned how to communicate effectively with people of every age, race, religion, and social class. When I was younger, I was always very shy and kept to myself, but through coaching and being an EMT I have gone out of my comfort zone and improved greatly as a communicator. I have also learned many physical skills through my community involvement. I learned the most skills through my time with Habitat for Humanity. I learned to cut wood, dig a foundation, pull out carpet, and other house remodeling skills. These skills learned through my community involvement I will be able to use when I have a house one day, and I would have never gained if I did not get involved. All of these examples are first hand testaments to why community involvement is so important. Not only does community involvement make you feel good and help others, but it has a lot to offer in terms of relationships, personal growth, and learning new skills. When deciding on a career, I wanted to enter a field that I was interested in, but I also wanted to make sure that that my career would allow me to help others everyday. After taking a few courses and speaking with my academic advisors on my career aspirations, I fell in love with the career of physician assistant (PA). The position of PA will allow me to pursue my passion of medicine and help the community everyday. My goal is to be able to become a provider in the medically underserved areas of North Carolina. During my time as an EMT in both my home county of Brunswick County and in Edgecombe County, where I went to school, I was able to see how a lack of providers in a medically underserved area could be devastating. I would see people everyday with chronic diseases that would be exacerbated due them not having a regular primary care provider to advise them on how to control their disease. I have seen the worst case scenario for some patients; we would find a patient deceased and ask to call their primary care doctor and the family would say they did not have one. These patients would resonate with me very deeply and have inspired me to try and become part of the solution. I am ready to commit to serving the community through the profession of PA for the rest of my career in order to create a better community where others are able to obtain a healthier life to pursue their goals.

COVID-19 has engulfed my life since the first case was found in the United States. There have been many tough and emotional times throughout this pandemic, but I have grown from it personally and I have seen the world grow from it as a whole. At the time COVID-19 was first discovered, I was finishing my senior year at North Carolina Wesleyan College. I was on the basketball team there and I was also a part time EMT with Edgecombe County Rescue Squad. The pandemic caused my school campus to close down including my housing and all my classes to become virtual. These changes made my learning extremely challenging, especially in the classes I had labs. I had to spend countless more hours trying to make sure I learned the material and felt prepared to graduate. The change in living status was also extremely difficult for me. Now that I had to move back in with my parents, my commute to work as an EMT was two and a half hours. I could not afford to be unemployed, and all of the EMS agencies around my new home were not hiring due to the fear of spreading the virus through a hiring process. COVID-19 hit my EMS agency hard and we had many people that were unable to work, so the healthy employees had to make sure the trucks stayed running. Some days I would wake up four hours early to drive to my shift, then work 48 hours straight, and then drive two and a half hours back home. This was extremely tough on me, but I knew that people were relying on me to be there when they needed help most. On top of the long commute and long hours, there was now the constant worry of catching the virus and spreading it to patients. We had numerous new cleaning protocols that decreased any possible downtime and we had increased stress knowing that we could possibly bring COVID-19 back to our families. Eventually the money and time it cost to commute became too much of a burden so I found a job as a COVID-19 tester in my hometown. This raised the chances of me contracting COVID-19 even higher and until I was recently vaccinated this caused me to be constantly isolating from family as much as possible. This last year has been extremely tiresome and the amount of death that I have witnessed has been heartbreaking, but not everything has been negative. I have learned a lot about myself and the world as a whole through these experiences. Personally, my passion for helping others through medicine has grown greatly. Through the pandemic I have been able to see the extreme need for more high level providers. I was recently accepted into physician assistant school at East Carolina University where I hope to expand my role in the healthcare field to be able to fill the void for high level providers. Also, my work ethic has grown through the pandemic. I have pushed myself past my old limits and now I know I am capable of much more than I thought before. The last thing that I personally learned through the pandemic was the importance of spending time with family and friends. Unfortunately, I have had to see many people die in nursing homes or in the hospital without their loved ones so it has made me realize the importance of spending time with loved ones. Once we are past the pandemic, I am going to put an emphasis in my life on visiting friends and family. Throughout the pandemic, the whole world has struggled together and we have lost far too many lives. However, through these times I feel I have learned a lot about the world. For example,I have learned the power of unity. A vaccine was able to be created in a little under a year through the hard work and dedication of scientists all around the world working together to solve the problem. I also learned the power of technology in the world. Many businesses and industries including schools have been able to stay functioning through the power of technology. The ability to run businesses and schools from long distances will allow more people to learn and have jobs. The last silver lining from the pandemic that I have seen throughout the world is more people enjoying and caring about nature. With movie theaters and amusement parks closed, this has forced more people to go outside and enjoy the beauties of nature. I hope this time out in nature will make people be more caring about nature and want to help clean up the environment so the beauties of nature can last for many more generations. I feel that coronavirus has not only changed my life forever, but the world as a whole. I have seen and experienced a lot of negatives in the last year, but I feel that the positives do not need to be left out because more positivity is needed in the world.

The tones go off at the station and my unit, Medic 52, is dispatched to a 22 year old found unconscious. Immediately my heart starts to race and I start walking myself through what I am going to do when I arrive on scene. When we get to the patient, my partner and I know it is too late. This young man had died many hours ago and there is nothing we can do for him. This was an attitude changing experience for me. This young man the same age as me was now gone from this earth so young and with so much potential. This experience made me consider how precious life is and how quickly life can be gone. A couple days later I found this young man's social media and it was very moving to see the great things people had written about him. This made me think about myself and what people would say about me if I were to be gone soon. This was a wake up call for me to think about what I have done on this earth so far and what I want to do in the future because you never know when it is your time. The whole experience of going on this call and self reflection brought me to exactly what a legacy is and what I want my legacy to be. A legacy is what a person leaves behind when they die or move on from something. A legacy can be something physical such as money, real estate, or a business. It can also be something intangible such as values, a mindset, or life lessons. A legacy that someone leaves behind can either be positive, negative or a bit of both. I personally believe that the greatest legacies are when a person leaves behind a plethora of both positive physical and intangible things for others, and that is exactly what I want to do with my legacy. I have enrolled into the East Carolina Physician Assistant Program for the Fall of 2021, and the position of physician assistant will set me up to make a great legacy both physically and intangibly. I want my intangible legacy to be a provider who genuinely cared about every patient he saw, and someone that served the community with integrity, passion, and a paramount work ethic. I want my physical legacy to be a home my family can pass down for generations, and college funds for my children and their children. I would also love to leave behind a ministry for healthcare workers where they are able to receive counseling on the tough issues they see everyday through a biblical stand point. I want this legacy to be consistent, and not a legacy that will waiver between people. I know this is not an easy task, but through my strong work ethic, passion for helping others, and faith, I can make this legacy a reality.