My wife and I both volunteered at a rural dept for a while, and she has her emt-b. Word was, most paid dept's were now requiring new fire/ems recruits to be paramedics (hence my wife now wanting to go to school to turn her emt-b into a paramedic cert/degree lol). You could check out wildland ff, get your basic training as a first responder and sign on with a crew for teh summer season to make some money and get dirty....then you could go to school in the winter if you wanted to continue. FYI, most wildland crews are not like structure fire/urban firefigters I have met it is a totally different beast lol.