"I see the obvious path leading to a further education in medicine, but I'll never give up being a paramedic," Tripp says. "Most of being a doctor involves working in a totally controlled environment, but being a paramedic means you get to play in the street."

Another Side of Harvard

Emergency medical technicians and paramedics who serve the Harvard community say they see Harvard students and faculty at their most vulnerable.

Rather than viewing Harvard students as America's gilded elite, most employees at Pro say the students they pick up tend to act just as stupidly as any other Cambridge residents.

"Most of the calls around Harvard are drunks, especially freshmen," says Richard H. Powers, a paramedic at Pro. "They tend to be obnoxious."

Harvard cases range from the mundane to the dramatic.

"General illness is probably the biggest thing; by that I mean heavy flu-like symptoms," Mergendahl says. "You also see plenty of drunks. The calls really run the gamut."

Harvard is certainly not immune to tragedy though.

"Up until recently we've had an average of one suicide a semester, especially around finals time," says Joel S. Jacobson, a paramedic.

Students are not the only ones served by the ambulances though.

"I've treated [Dean Epps] before," Jacobson says.

Mergendahl says he vividly remembers two high-profile cases at Harvard--the alleged food poisoning two years ago and the murder-suicide in the spring of 1995.

"Health Services, which is supposed to handle 20 to 30 people, had 120 people stacked into the hallways [during the food poisoning epidemic]," he says. "There were people doubled over in the halls of the houses and lying in the streets. We took about 30 people out that night."

Jacobson and Powers both responded to the highly publicized murder-suicide involving two members of the class of 1996. The day before students left campus in the spring of 1995, Sinedu Tadesse stabbed her roommate Trang Ho before hanging herself in the bathroom.

"[The call] first came in as a laceration," Powers says. "Then it came in as someone, who stabbed someone else, that they hadn't caught yet."