Darien EMS member earns national scholarship toward pre-med school
DARIEN — There’s a moment each year during the Memorial Day parade that Darien EMS Post 53 shares a tradition: As the members of the nation’s only high school student first responder organization walk under the railroad underpass on the Post Road, a flag is passed from the graduating seniors to the next class of leaders.
“It’s my proudest moment,” Lindsay Smith said. “... We are all each other’s biggest fans. We are such a great community.”
Smith recently experienced another moment of pride when she was awarded the Claes Nobel Future Female Leader Scholarship by the National Society of High School Scholars, to help fund her future studies in premed at the University of Texas in Austin.
This scholarship was established to encourage and empower young women to assume future leadership roles, and to become mentors for the young women. Of nearly 600 applications, Smith was one of 10 students who were selected to each be awarded a $1,000 scholarship.
Smith said she was proud and grateful to earn it.
These student first responders face every stress and emergency that their adult counterparts do, and Smith said she wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I think I have an increased sense of maturity after Post 53. We see people at their scariest moments, sometimes they are seriously injured or near death. They could be crying,” she said.
Often, Post 53 responds to things like falls or broken bones. But the proximity to I-95 means there are car accidents — serious ones.
“It can be really intense,” she said. rBeing an EMT had added challenges and risks over the lat year. Smith said she was out of service during the few first months of the pandemic last year due to surgery. However she kept involved with her colleagues’ work and couldn’t wait to get back on the job.
The pandemic also changed many ways that Post 53 responded to emergencies. The number of volunteers on the ambulances had to be minimal, full hazmat wear was required for responses and no oxygen was allowed to be given on the ambulances.
Despite being on the medical frontlines, Smith said their extensive sanitation and best practices meant only about three cases of COVID-19 on the team of about 80. They had the impetus to keep all healthy.
“We were needed. We couldn’t get shut down,” she said.
Smith has always been fascinated with medicine. As a child, she considered perhaps become a veterinarian, but in eighth grade, Post 53 volunteers visited Middlesex Middle School to talk about becoming a volunteer.
Smith was immediately interested and signed up for the prerequesite first aid class. Posties, as they are called, go through several steps, and then a 90day probation period before becoming official members.
Now that she is on the leadership side, Smith actively participates in training new volunteers, which she said has been more challenging during the pandemic. Many of the training sessions are virtual and the in-person ones need to be filled with many types of hands on training.
She urges any middle or high schoolers who are “remotely interested” to sign up for the first aid class.
“I think Post 53 is one of the best gifts — the school, the community, the life experience,” she said. Smith also reminded the community that Post 53 survives on donations and asks any who wish to support to make a donation.
In the future, Smith said she’ hasconsidered a few different specialties, including an OB-GYN or an orthopedic surgeon.
As a lifelong Irish dancer, Smith said she will compete in the national championship in Irish dancing this summer in Arizona before heading to school to begin her pre-med classes.