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So I'm 21 and currently living in Austin, TX and currently taking several classes online and working in fine dining as a server. I've always been interested in the fire service but haven't really looked into it seriously up until recently. As I understand it most firefighters are volunteers, but the surrounding area has very few positions and I wasn't sure how to get my foot into the door. I also know that most firefighters are EMT/Paramedics. I would love some insight into the profession and how to go about training and preparing myself to be a viable candidate. Would it be worth it to go towards studying fire protection technology in community college? 1.) Currently debt free 2.) No drug problems/no record 3.) I lead an active/healthy lifestyle 4.) Willing to move if the opportunity is right Thanks for the info.
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Sep 30, 2015 16:47
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Out here in Virginia at least there's really not such a thing as 'positions' for the volunteer stuff, if you wanna do it they'll take you, if you wanna show up for a month for a free shirt you can use to really not impress girls, they'll take you, and they'll figure out what to do with you after you've got some worthwhile skills under your belt. It'll be a process to make you useful for anything but they handle all the certification and stuff internally and in the meantime you can always uh take inventory and clean and stuff. It's definitely worth volunteering to see if it's for you before you sink a ton of time and money into pursuing it, the job's not much like any other and it's definitely not for everybody. If you take all the coursework etc. as a volunteer it's paid for and you get hands-on experience (like as not, sitting around the station all day waiting for the fat guy to call in that he's fallen over and needs someone to pick him up) whereas going in on your own is significantly expensive and a lot of hassle for something it's very possible you'll find out you don't actually want to do once you've actually tried it IRL. Your community college's AS or whatever is not the certification they are looking for, though it wouldn't hurt either - look up who does say EMT Basics out where you are A Wizard of Goatse fucked around with this message at 17:52 on Sep 30, 2015 |
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Sep 30, 2015 17:48
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MacMillan posted:So I'm 21 and currently living in Austin, TX and currently taking several classes online and working in fine dining as a server. I've always been interested in the fire service but haven't really looked into it seriously up until recently. As I understand it most firefighters are volunteers, but the surrounding area has very few positions and I wasn't sure how to get my foot into the door. I also know that most firefighters are EMT/Paramedics. I would love some insight into the profession and how to go about training and preparing myself to be a viable candidate. Would it be worth it to go towards studying fire protection technology in community college? well, you are talking about two different things. Volunteer and career fireman. Typically, volunteer departments will accept you as a green horn and train you to be a fire fighter. But just realize that there is no pay and you will get calls at different times of day and night. Depending on the department, you will get a message, beep, or whatever and then you either drive to the station to pick up the truck or you drive to the scene in your own vehicle. Either way, you will have to equip your car/truck with lights and siren. Career fireman are what you get in towns and cities such as Austin. They get a paycheck and usually work one long shift (24hrs) and then have one or two days off. While on the clock, they stay at the fire station instead. Career firemen get their jobs just like a policeman would. They will take a civil service test, do a physical test, and if get accepted....go to the cities fire academy to be trained. The city tend to advertise these tests about once or twice a year on their website. Some cities may require a college degree so you need to check on that before applying. Here in Plano, Texas.....the fireman are also trained as paramedics and they run their own ambulance service. They also pay well.....remember the college degree? here is Plano's fire department hiring process just as a FYI. https://www.plano.gov/333/Employment
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Oct 1, 2015 02:18
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How to be fires man: 1) Meet the qualifications for the department you're interested in. This varies by location, so you have to go to their websites and look it up. 2) Sign up on a government list. 3) Wait until your name is called on that list. Generally this is between 2-5 years. Sometimes there are different lists which get called in different priorities (for example, in NYC, if you're already part of FDNY but not a fireman, which means usually that you are working on one of their ambulances as an EMT, you get called ahead of genpop), which sometimes means the people on the good list get called in 1-2 years and the people on the bad list basically never get called. 4) Take a bullshit physical test. Sometimes instead of this you have to take a difficult physical test. 5) Enter the academy. This is mostly some dickhead pretending you're in the military so you shave your head as a sign of unit cohesion and run laps all day long and get yelled at. There might be a little school that will mostly involve "Listen to your lieutenant or else you will burn to death." Don't wash out. Congrats, you are a fireman. Now you get assigned to the worst station and can transfer to a different one in a few years maybe. If your region has EMT/Paramedics on its engines (mostly red states) you may be almost required to get that out of the way before you can join.* EMT is easy, you take a class that you can find by looking at the NREMT website which is about as much work as one college class and then apply for jobs -- your first jobs will be trucking healthy patients home rather than sick ones to the hospital and are mostly bullshit, after a few months of that you can start looking for actual 911 work which is the only experience anyone cares about further up the line. Medic is very difficult -- you have to be an EMT for six months on a 911 bus then pay about 10k for a one year long full time (like 8-5 four to five days a week) schooling program with a ton of additional time required on medic ambulances as a third. Once you're a medic if you've been working in the 911 system you may be able to upgrade with your current employer to a 911 medic bus. If you snuck into the program without 911 experience (happens a lot these days mostly because these medic programs are for-profit) then you'll start doing medic level tranports (your pts are hooked up to a vent or a cardiac monitor -- most of these calls are still bullshit). Neither job pays well and 911 jobs can be hard to get at either level in some regions. EMT work at the 911 level is mostly taking people who don't really need to go to the hospital to the hospital and occasionally doing CPR for medics on a basically unsaveable dead guy or once in a while a bad trauma (trauma is a basic level call because it's mostly getting them to a surgeon quickly that helps, not anything you can do in the field). Medics get to do less BS (though still a lot of it) and some really cool things including some procedures that only doctors really do in hospitals, and they get the privilege of being grossly underpaid for it. *Some regions will train you to be a medic once you're already a firefighter but that's mostly for legacy guys who got hired before that was required or who had connections to get them into the department. Don't count on this. Count on having to do it the hard way. raton fucked around with this message at 03:42 on Oct 1, 2015 |
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Oct 1, 2015 03:34
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Sheep-Goats posted:How to be fires man: I'm more than willing to study EMT/Paramedic, I just wouldn't want my full-time job being on an ambulance. I guess after reading up on all of the replies is to become a careerman. Other than prior military service (as well as previous fire/medic experience...) what could up my chances on the list?
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Oct 1, 2015 16:03
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MacMillan posted:I'm more than willing to study EMT/Paramedic, I just wouldn't want my full-time job being on an ambulance. I guess after reading up on all of the replies is to become a careerman. Other than prior military service (as well as previous fire/medic experience...) what could up my chances on the list? The list is the list, you get a number, you wait for your number to be called, they call them in order. You need to call your local FD to find out if they have a priority list or not if their website doesn't make it clear. Also there are probably shithole counties that do "merit based" applications which means 100% nepotism. Why wouldn't you want ambulance work to be your full time job exactly? You do understand that there are basically no fires any more and that firefighters basically function as EMTs/Paramedics in an oversized ambulance most of the time, right?
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Oct 1, 2015 16:40
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Sheep-Goats posted:The list is the list, you get a number, you wait for your number to be called, they call them in order. You need to call your local FD to find out if they have a priority list or not if their website doesn't make it clear. Also there are probably shithole counties that do "merit based" applications which means 100% nepotism. As I understand it (at least here in central Texas) 70% of calls are medical, 30% are fire related. Maybe I'll look into Wildland firefighting.. MacMillan fucked around with this message at 18:02 on Oct 1, 2015 |
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Oct 1, 2015 17:44
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MacMillan posted:I'm more than willing to study EMT/Paramedic, I just wouldn't want my full-time job being on an ambulance. I guess after reading up on all of the replies is to become a careerman. Other than prior military service (as well as previous fire/medic experience...) what could up my chances on the list? There's a firefighting thread in ... whatever the gently caress GiP is now, perhaps a better place to ask. The requirement to be a medic first depends on the department -- famously, FDNY has a lot of medics that failed the firefighter test, but my burg has FFs and Medics separately, though you're pretty much guaranteed a spot in an Engine company if you have both certs. By FDNY rules, Medic-ing will be your fulltime job for at least a couple years before you get the chance to try out for a FF spot. I don't know how Austin FD works, so ymmv. Generally you do the volunteer thing for a few years to learn the ropes and/or take a class at your local community college, then apply to the paid squad and take the civil service exam and all that. And, like most civil service jobs, the pay is poo poo but they've got a good union/retirement benefits, if you live long enough to retire. Wildland is usually the volunteers, if they call in the USFS smokejumpers, you're not likely to be one of them (pretty sure the USFS' firefighting arm is well-supplied with prior military service that don't need to be trained on how to jump out of planes, see below). Sources: My cousin who got hired directly into the city FD, a family friend who did years on the small-town-next-door vollie squad before getting a job in the city, my other cousin who did a couple seasons as a smokejumper for fun after leaving the Army as a Ranger Captain, a coworker who is also the chief of a local volunteer department and looks just like the Medic from TF2, and various firefighters I've met on the job as a photojournalist.
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Oct 2, 2015 11:14
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Bad Angus! Bad!
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MacMillan posted:I'm more than willing to study EMT/Paramedic, I just wouldn't want my full-time job being on an ambulance. I guess after reading up on all of the replies is to become a careerman. Other than prior military service (as well as previous fire/medic experience...) what could up my chances on the list? There is also another issue that you might want to consider. Either being a EMT or firefighter, you are going to see things that most people will never see....if you catch my drift. For example, just yesterday, there was a accident on a overpass in south Dallas involving a SUV and a semi-rig hauling lumber. Due to the wreck, both caught on fire and four people burned to death in the car. Four adults and two children with one adult pregnant. The fire was so intense that no one saw the car until fire was pretty much put out. Just something you might want to think about.
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Oct 7, 2015 00:12
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MacMillan posted:As I understand it (at least here in central Texas) 70% of calls are medical, 30% are fire related. Maybe I'll look into Wildland firefighting.. Of those 30% fire calls 85% are going to be a box smoldering in someone's driveway or some wheat burning next to a road that no one cares about. Firefigher is a legacy job that continually has to justify its existence because of the hilarious lack of fires these days. There are still enough fires that we need firefighters and we need to have enough of them around that it doesn't take them 40 minutes to get to a scene, but the truth is most of their time is spend in long j/o sessions in the firehouse and occasionally showing up to medical calls where an ambulance crew does the medical stuff and they watch so they can mark another call down on the log.
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Oct 7, 2015 00:58
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Sheep-Goats posted:Of those 30% fire calls 85% are going to be a box smoldering in someone's driveway or some wheat burning next to a road that no one cares about. Firefigher is a legacy job that continually has to justify its existence because of the hilarious lack of fires these days. There are still enough fires that we need firefighters and we need to have enough of them around that it doesn't take them 40 minutes to get to a scene, but the truth is most of their time is spend in long j/o sessions in the firehouse and occasionally showing up to medical calls where an ambulance crew does the medical stuff and they watch so they can mark another call down on the log. So you can tell this guy lives in Maine or Washington or something. There's a major forest/wild fire in response range of my home town's fire station every single summer, as well as dozens of smaller ones and the occasional structural fire, typically 1 a month. But everyone knows California burns down every year so whatever.
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Oct 9, 2015 12:33
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Larry Parrish posted:So you can tell this guy lives in Maine or Washington or something. There's a major forest/wild fire in response range of my home town's fire station every single summer, as well as dozens of smaller ones and the occasional structural fire, typically 1 a month. But everyone knows California burns down every year so whatever. California is the burning box in America's driveway
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Oct 9, 2015 16:49
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Oh and Wildland FF isn't really a career because there are no winter jobs doing it and the few that are are filled by guys who entered a city fire dept when they were 18 through nepotism and "retired" at 43 when they got their full pension and now gently caress around telling helicopters and trucks where to go on mountain during the summer and making phonecalls to politicians in the winter.
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Oct 10, 2015 01:11
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Larry Parrish posted:So you can tell this guy lives in Maine or Washington or something. There's a major forest/wild fire in response range of my home town's fire station every single summer, as well as dozens of smaller ones and the occasional structural fire, typically 1 a month. But everyone knows California burns down every year so whatever. I've also lived in NYC and I assure you the percentages hold for them, it's just that there are no driveways so instead they watch cars burn that someone threw a cigarette into or a tiny grease fire at the Chinese takeout joint. You actually probably do less real fires in an urban setting simply because so many more structures have commercial fire suppression in them.
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Oct 10, 2015 01:15
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Sheep-Goats posted:I've also lived in NYC and I assure you the percentages hold for them, it's just that there are no driveways so instead they watch cars burn that someone threw a cigarette into or a tiny grease fire at the Chinese takeout joint. You actually probably do less real fires in an urban setting simply because so many more structures have commercial fire suppression in them. I tend to agree with you on this. The majority of the calls our fire department goes on is auto accidents and they use the big trucks for traffic control and safety. We did have one truck with a water spike on the end of the ladder. Basically a six foot long metal spike with holes on the end for water to come out. The idea was that the spike was pushed through the roof of a burning house and used like a giant water sprinkler. I think they got rid of that truck a while back.....never used the spike, I suppose.
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Oct 12, 2015 01:07
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