His family life growing up was very interesting. His parents were foster parents so he had lots of brothers and sisters. A lot of them were temporary but a few of them were legally adopted into their family. Andy says that he was always the youngest, always the baby in the family until they adopted a girl with Downs Syndrome when he was 14 and she was a baby. He loved having a baby sister and he learned a lot through that experience. He was very involved in taking care of her medically early on. She had congestive heart failure and leukemia on top of the Downs Syndrome. They adopted her knowing she most likely wouldn’t live past 10 years old. She passed away when she was only six and Andy was 19 or 20.

His dad has always had epilepsy and as he’s gotten older it has gotten worse. Several years ago, a church group convinced his dad to stop medications. After he had a series of grand mal seizures the group abandoned him. As a result of the disease and its effects, his father currently has significant brain damage. This, however, has not stopped his mom from continuing to take in and care for children that society has forgotten about. Eleven years ago they took in a boy with cerebral palsy and she has since adopted him. The boy is now 18 years old.

When asked what he would change about his family if he could, he simply answered, “I probably would not have moved around as much. We moved around a lot, always within the same city but to different houses. That was always really hard.” And when asked what he definitely would not change, Andy spoke quite fondly of his family and his childhood. “I wouldn’t change anything about the way my parents treated all of the kids. They were great parents and we were really fortunate. And even with all the foster kids coming and going, there was always a really big sense of family and belonging.”

His favorite memory of his childhood was the first house he lived in. It was an old Air Force Base house. He had a trap door in his closet that led to the underside of the house, where he used to play.

He came to Alaska with his family in November of 2001 from Burlington, Washington. Unfortunately on the way here they were in an accident and rolled his van down an embankment just outside of Teslin in the Yukon Territory. “The accident messed up my back pretty bad so I didn’t work after I finally got here.” Andy has lived all along the western seaboard: Seattle, Mt. Vernon, Los Angeles, and Burbank.

Adams has had several jobs over the years: head of a web hosting company’s tech support department in Los Angeles, an airframe and propulsion mechanic in Burbank, and even an administrative assistant for the USDA Rural Development division in Mt. Vernon, Washington. “Right now I’m very happy working as a peer advisor at the Campus Services desk.”

Andy decided in 2005 that he needed to go back to school. He got his GED over the summer of 2006 and two months later was enrolled as a full-time student in Computer Electronics at KPC. When Andy first started looking at the programs available, the Paramedic degree jumped out at him immediately. He says, “I had a lot of family in the EMS field who loved it. I’m not afraid to admit I was a little intimidated, though.” He got through one semester of Computer Electronics before switching to the Paramedic program. He adds, “I had spoken with Paul and Tiffany Perry quite a bit over the semester and, unbeknownst to them, they helped me get over my anxiety. I switched my major in the middle of the fall and am now exactly where I need to be.” His aunt worked as a dispatcher and his grandmother was a deputy sheriff. He says that having a sister with lots of medical problems influenced his desire to work in the medical field.

His favorite memories of being here at KPC are working in student services, gaining new friends that he really believes will be lifetime friends, and learning. “The one thing I really enjoy about college is learning new things. I don’t just mean learning the things in my field of study. College teaches you about life; how to take hold of yourself and go where you need to.”

In his downtime Andy likes to keep up on his hobbies. “I’m a huge book junkie and I like reading just about anything, but mostly sci-fi, history and comics.” Andy said that he really enjoys social interplay and social interaction. He’s always been really into acting and performing. He loves being able to slip into a different role. That passion has led to Andy’s love for role-playing games (such as Dungeons and Dragons, Star Wars, Serenity, and others) and video games. “I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek and Star Wars, much to the chagrin of my friends.” He says that he also has an annoying habit of breaking into random accents. His favorites are British, Australian, Irish, Scottish, Russian, German, Swedish, Spanish and southern.

His future goals are to be working as a paramedic somewhere in Alaska. He also wouldn’t mind teaching in the paramedic program here at KPC or elsewhere.

He adds, “Since I was asked, I guess the one thing about me that I really like is my ability to get along with just about anyone. Very rarely do I find a person that I just cannot connect with on one level or another. It’s probably one thing that’s going to help me get along well in my future career as a Paramedic.”

Andy would like to thank Todd and Chris for helping him out with this feature.