The Job That Helped Her Become a Doctor

An hour before this interview, Amelia opened an email and learned she had been accepted to medical school.

Amelia has worked at Royal Ambulance for four and a half years, which is roughly seven times the average tenure of an EMT here.

She arrived at UC Santa Cruz as a pre-med student and was sure that she wanted to be a doctor. Then she got to college and started watching what being pre-med actually looked like. The hours. The cliffs of organic chemistry. The arms race of the application. The polished, predetermined version of yourself you were apparently supposed to be performing by sophomore year. “When I started college, I was like, I want to be a doctor,” she says. “I realized that actually sounds crazy town. It’s a lot of work in ways that are unimaginable to even apply.” It was not the medicine that scared her. It was the lifestyle the path demanded. “They really want you to be a certain type of person who applies. So I didn’t want to do that. I just wanted to have fun. I was nineteen. I wanted to have fun with my friends and go to the beach.”

So she stepped away. She did not abandon medicine; she just stopped trying to muscle her way toward it. A friend told her about a way to keep one foot in healthcare without committing to anything. “He had just gotten his EMT certification and said, it’s a great way to see if you like healthcare at all.”

She took the summer course. A Royal recruiter came to her class. The phone rang a few weeks later. She said yes, the way nineteen-year-olds say yes to most things, which is to say without quite understanding what she had agreed to.

The job, she expected, would tell her whether healthcare was for her. It did. It just took longer than she thought, and the answer was different from what she imagined.

What surprised her first was how much she could find in a transport that, on paper, was nothing. “I can find meaning in a transport. No matter what, it’s very easy for me to see that that is meaningful. Even just taking someone home from a nursing home. You were there for them, you comforted them, you made it not scary.” She is describing the most ordinary call an EMT can run. Amelia found something in it anyway.

What she was learning was the part of medicine that medical education itself almost never teaches. How to walk into a room full of someone else’s fear and lower the temperature in it. “I have five years of walking into a hospital room where I don’t know the person, and having to immediately interface with a stranger, and to touch a stranger, which is really hard and really weird at first,” she says. “And then sit next to them, two feet away from their face for two hours.” Her doctor friends will tell you this is the part of the job that cannot be taught in a classroom. Amelia had it before she had anything else.

Then she moved up to critical care transport, and CCT cracked the hospital open. “In BLS, you’re just on the floors and in the tiny rooms in the ER. But CCT, you’re everywhere.” The ICU. The trauma rooms. The OR. She started watching medicine being practiced in the rooms where the hardest medicine happens, the rooms most people in healthcare will spend a career glimpsing through a doorway. The thing she had once described as crazy town was no longer an idea on a page. It was a job, being done by a person three feet from her.

“That really helped me,” she says. “Just like being closer to the job I was actually applying for, and realizing what that actually looks like.” She does not say it was inspiring. She says it was clarifying. The pieces of medicine that had felt impossible at nineteen looked different when she was standing inside them. She was no longer guessing at what the work asked, and she was watching herself, in the same room, not flinching.

After about a year and a half on CCT, she wanted more out of the job itself. “I needed more after a year and a half. I was like, hey, I want another job.” She moved into the CCT coordinator role, which she still holds, which means she now teaches the EMTs coming up behind her.

She runs their recruitment presentations. She trains them on the medicine they will be expected to know in the back of an ambulance. At twenty-five, she is the person other people in this building learn from. The pre-med student who at nineteen could not picture herself leading anything in healthcare had become, almost without noticing, the person new EMTs hope to become.

And then the thing she had decided at nineteen was not for her quietly became the thing she wanted again. “I keep loving it, actually,” she says. “Now I want to be a doctor.”

She started studying for the MCAT. She started writing essays. She submitted her application last May, almost exactly a year ago, and then spent the next twelve months in limbo. Interviews. Waitlists. “It’s been a really, really long journey,” she says. “I just spent a year writing about myself and begging schools to let me in.” She did all of it on top of a full-time job, on top of training other EMTs, on top of a life. The person who had decided medicine asked too much of the people who chose it had decided to ask it of herself.

She is glad she is twenty-five and not twenty-one. “I just know who I am a lot better.” She has spent her early twenties walking into rooms full of strangers, asking them about their pain, sitting two feet from their faces, and finding something to talk about. She is walking into medical school not as a kid trying to prove she belongs there, but as someone who has already been doing a version of the work for years.

When you ask her what she would tell someone standing at the beginning of all this, she does not say work harder, or pick the right major, or check the right boxes. She says, “Follow what you are inspired by. Try it. And if you don’t like it, stop. Find something else.”

There is a version of the doctor’s journey that runs in a straight line, from a childhood declaration through the right college, the right MCAT score, and the right white coat.

Amelia’s is not that version. Hers ran through a job she took because the timing was good and a friend said it might help her figure things out. It ran through patients who will never know they were the ones who taught her she wanted this after all. It ran through a place that, when she asked for room to grow, gave it to her, and kept giving it to her, until the future she had once been too scared to choose was the one she was already living.

We are going to miss her. We have watched her grow up here. We have watched her go from a college student picking up shifts to one of the people this place actually runs on, the kind of person who shows up not just for the work but for everyone learning alongside her.

The hardest part of running a place like this is letting your best people go become what they were always going to become. The best part is knowing you were one of the places they needed along the way.

Today, she found out she gets to keep going. We could not be prouder of future MD Amelia DeAndreis.