Pérez said his first helicopter flight “was exhilarating, and I couldn’t stop smiling the whole flight.”
Pérez first became an EMT and volunteer firefighter during high school in Connecticut where he volunteered with a local ambulance corps.
After graduating, he took a gap year to attend paramedic school in Denver, Colorado, before returning to his hometown of New Haven to work as a paramedic. He continued this work again following his first year at Bowdoin.
Wanting to spend a summer in Maine, Pérez found LifeFlight and pitched a potential internship to them. He quickly realized that he had a lot in common with Medical Director Norm Dinerman, who had been the medical director for Denver Health Paramedics and who had also completed his residency at the Yale Emergency Medicine Department in New Haven.
With a funded internship grant from Bowdoin's Office of Career Exploration and Development (CXD), his dream internship became a reality.
Throughout the experience, Pérez got to ride along with clinical crews on helicopters, complete a research project analyzing patient outcomes across different modes of transportation, observe safety trainings with the crew, and work with the LifeFlight Foundation, the organization’s fundraising branch.
“One of my favorite things about working at LifeFlight and with emergency medicine in general is that the patients are totally undifferentiated,” Pérez said. “You take care of everybody who walks through the door no matter what....It’s your job to make them better. And so you have to be good at everything.”
Once or twice every week, Pérez would commute to LifeFlight’s base in Bangor and complete twelve-hour shifts as a student observer on board an air ambulance. Wanting to be a pilot when he was a kid, Pérez said he loves to fly. But flying in a helicopter was a new experience for him.
“It smells like jet fuel ... It’s hot. And then all of a sudden the whole thing just kind of rocks a little bit and you go up right off the ground,” he said. “It was exhilarating, and I couldn’t stop smiling the whole flight.”
Pérez, who wants to pursue medicine after Bowdoin, said that his experience this summer further strengthened his desire to study emergency medicine or critical care. He said LifeFlight helped him to understand the systemic barriers to receiving medical care that many individuals and communities face.
He said he remembered being a brand-new EMT and feeling a “sense of calm” when the paramedics arrived on the scene. Working with LifeFlight, he got to be on the other side.
“It’s really cool to be a part of the expert team,” Pérez said. “That was a really awesome thing to be a part of.”
