In Case of Emergency

At Texas A&M in 1976, though, there was no dedicated EMS for Aggie students, faculty and staff. The College Station Fire Department handled all emergency calls but did not have the resources to place ambulances directly on campus or staff the university’s many large gatherings. Jim Persons ’78, a health education student at the time, regularly volunteered to assist his professor, Laura Kitzmiller, and a group of other medical students in providing medical support at football games, races at Texas World Speedway and other crowded events around the area.

“We started with about five students bringing a first-aid kit,” Persons remembered. “After a while, we began looking into putting together a student organization.” Together, the students created the Texas A&M Emergency Care Team (ECT), with unpaid volunteers training themselves and others on CPR and other life-saving procedures to answer emergency calls on campus. Early on, they had barely enough equipment to fill a small closet in the A.P. Beutel Health Center’s basement. When the group acquired its first ambulance in 1980, making the ECT one of the first dedicated ambulance services in Brazos County, it came in the form of a refitted station wagon.

“From the first day, it was about Aggies serving Aggies,” Persons said. “We were a service organization. We wanted to deliver that service to our current and former students, faculty, staff and visitors. It was also an opportunity to get a real-world health education outside the classroom.”

After Persons and the founding ECT members graduated, the team carried on, responding to hundreds of calls per year throughout the ’90s. The university eventually split the ECT into two divisions: TAMU EMS, an official university ambulance service under Student Health Services with paid staff, and TAMU ECT, which remained a volunteer student organization with mentorship opportunities for those interested in giving medical care or simply learning CPR. In 2014, the two services merged, with TAMU EMS now offering volunteer opportunities as ECT once did.

One Team, One Mission

Today, TAMU EMS is considered best in class among the nation’s university EMS programs. The service consists of emergency medical technicians (EMTs)—many of them current and former students—as well as paramedics. A fully equipped ambulance has long since replaced the old station wagon, and a second ambulance arrived in 2021. “Most universities only keep a volunteer EMT service and maybe an ambulance,” Middleton stated. “Very few of them have the resources we have now as far as paramedic and MICU capabilities.”
 

In addition to delivering quality care on campus and at events as their predecessors did, TAMU EMS gives student EMTs and paramedics opportunities to gain experience responding to real calls and caring for real people. Luke Parrent ’23, a medical school-bound senior EMT, joined the organization to get that kind of valuable experience but quickly found even more value in its tight-knit community.

“I was struggling with my classes as a freshman,” Parrent remembered. “At one point, we had a football game on Saturday, and it was a real all-hands-on-deck event. I had two tests that week, and I was juggling getting my head around all the material and mentally prepping for the game. Some field training officers saw me studying and sat down after our training meetings one night to review my biology coursework with me for maybe an hour and a half. They knew I was struggling and dropped everything to help.”
 

The list of services that TAMU EMS provides goes on and on. From its humble origins as an organization founded and operated by a handful of upstart Aggie students, EMS now staffs a plethora of events year-round, including athletic events, the Corps of Cadets’ field training exercises, March to the Brazos and other student socials. They service all these events, including preparing and executing hyper-complex operations around football games, and still answer calls from across Aggieland daily. 

Persons has watched the plucky service organization he helped found more than four decades ago grow into the campus institution it is now. “None of us could have dreamed that it would become what it is today,” he said. More than TAMU EMS’ sheer growth, Persons expressed pride in its students and staff acting in line with the organization’s initial spirit of “Aggies helping Aggies,” especially in dire times.

“I look back on November 18, 1999,” he said, referring to the tragic Aggie Bonfire collapse that claimed 12 students’ lives. “Twenty-three years later, it’s still emotional to talk about. But TAMU EMS and ECT were some of the first responders on the scene that day. I look at what those students did and the level of expertise and professionalism they demonstrated when other agencies arrived. They did an astounding amount of work after that disaster. They were nothing short of incredible.”

Passionate about TAMU EMS’ work saving lives? A scholarship can cover the cost for new EMS staff members to receive EMT or paramedic training. For more information, contact Karen Slater ’88 using the form below.