To anyone that has even thought of something more outside an office, try it so long as you're physically able. Compensation is one thing, but the experience for me has been priceless.
Yep. When I got hired on at the fire department I took a $12,000 pay cut. Overtime was abundant so it was easy to make up the loss plus some. But you definitely can't purchase the experience
Either due to the remoteness of rural living or just people in rural areas have more grit, the call volumes are much lower.
I live in Florida, but I am from a small rural town in MO and my mom still lives where I grew up. I was just there in August and I picked up a brochure for the county ambulance. They have 5 ambulances for the entire county and their call volume was approximately 3000 calls per year!
The county fire department I worked at has approximately 40 station and the busiest station doing 3000+ EMS calls on its own. Our department did all the 911 transports. When I left in 2020 we ran approximately 90,000 calls.