Many volunteer departments will pay for you to get your EMT certification, which is about 160 hours and at the high school graduate level. It is basically "non-invasive" interventions, anything else requires paramedic which, between class time and ride time is around a 1,600 hour effort.

Compassion fatigue, depending on where you work or volunteer, is a real thing, and is ultimately the reason I retired after 14 years as a volunteer and part time EMT, paramedic, firefighter, instructor, state evaluator for new certification and continuing ed, and SEI (senior EMS instructor) accreditation, which is a state requirement to be able to oversee and sign off on the accreditation of new EMTs to the Department of Health (in my state your program needs to be certified by the DOH, and one of those requirements is oversight by an SEI who ultimately accepts responsibility for delivery of the curriculum and attestation of test documentation and results.

Culture can be a challenge, depending on where you are, yet around here there are regularly engine companies staffed by all women (who, sadly, regularly have to answer the question of whether their CPAT - candidate physical agility test - is the same as the men's. It is).

Private ambulance and in particular IFT (interfacility) can be a drain. And most companies in private EMS nickel and dime the shit out of everything, rigs that are 300,000 miles in, held together by hopes and dreams, high call volumes - the right partner on those shifts makes it a fist bumping "we're in this together", the wrong partner makes it a miserable "FML".

There is an aspect of EMT training that is "how not to kill your patient who is critically sick or injured before they get to definitive care", and there is a lot that is 2am "I fell going to the bathroom".

It is hell on your body. You are picking people up off the floor, working around them in cramped conditions that say "fuck ergonomics and lifting mechanics". My students stand around on a big concrete pad in the apparatus bay of a fire station well lit on a Saturday afternoon. "This is the most perfect scene you will ever show up on". In reality it's 3am, the patient is morbidly obese, wedged between the toilet and bath in their double wide (none of this is judgmental, it's just the scenarios you have to work on).

And you're going to get paid utter shit.

Realize that most of the EMT salary reporting you might see online is a weird hybrid of paramedic and EFT pay reporting. The PNW is progressive and you'll be lucky to break $20/hour. Want to do it in the SE and it's very likely you'll be at half that, with companies promising that "you'll make more than you think because you can get as much OT as you like!" which is ... not the promise it's cracked up to be.

I loved it, relished it, it was my life. I missed it but now, mostly, I just look back on it and think of the few patients I genuinely made a difference to, above and beyond immediate outcomes.