Balancing school and a job as an EMT-B

[Grandpa2390]

I am thinking of getting a job as either an EMT or CNA, but would prefer EMT. My question is for those of you who do this, how do you work the 50 hours a week and go to school. Do you work just during the summer, or do schedule your classes around the job. How does that work?

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[silverhorse84]

I am thinking of getting a job as either an EMT or CNA, but would prefer EMT. My question is for those of you who do this, how do you work the 50 hours a week and go to school. Do you work just during the summer, or do schedule your classes around the job. How does that work?

I don't know how they do things in your area, but when I was an EMT my ambulance company had reserve EMTs - you didn't work a set number of hours but rather picked up stuff when people were on vacation/sick leave/etc. That way I could work on the weekend (lots of people call in "sick" on weekends), holidays, or pick up overnight stuff when people would split shifts.
The other real way to do it, if they're going to give you a set schedule, is to schedule school around work. I've seen it done, but it took the person more years to graduate because he kept having to put off classes that didn't fit with his work schedule.

 

[jc14]

My friends who work as EMTs with the traditional 24 on / 48 off mostly take online classes. Timewise it is very difficult to manage a full-time job and full-time school, especially the prerequisite courses on the pre-med path. Perhaps more of an obstacle is the logistics, however. If you are in fact on a A,B,C shift calendar, or some variation, it Will conflict with classes. (Not in the same way every week.) I work as an EMT part time...fortunately we are not on a shift rotation, we can work a specific day every week if you want. (For instance if you have no classes on Tuesday/Thursday..) I work a lot of weekends, and a ton in the summer, with some weekday shifts intermingled. If you can find a service that gives you this scheduling option, it works out...but I'm not sure if it would in a 50 hour per week quantity.

 

[Markobenin]

I worked as an EMT for a private ambulance company for my first 3 years in college while majoring in Biomedical Engineering at a UC. I was doing 12hr shifts on weekends, so I would do those instead of 24hr shifts if I were you. It's all about time management and doing your homework / studying on your time off at work or in between calls. Also, DON'T procrastinate with your classes, or it'll bite you in the butt. Let me know if you have further questions.

 

[ShinyDome19]

I worked as an EMT-B for a private company for a year, while going to school full time (I think I took around 14 hrs both semester, but 2 hours were research). My work shifts were 24 hrs long and I usually pulled 2-3 shifts a week. I had to schedual my classes on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays...Normally, I worked from 7 in the morning until 7 the next morning, and headed straight to my 8:00 class. Usually wasnt too bad, unless i ended up having one of those nights where we were called out every 15 mins, preventing us from getting any sleep really. I also made sure all my professors knew what I was doing because there was a possibility, and it happened several times during the semester, where if the weather was bad or something and the transport helicopters couldnt fly, I would be sent out on a long distance transport in the middle of the night...generally 8-16 hour trips and just couldnt make it back in time for my classes...
Interestingly, I took some of my more difficult classes that year, and ended up bringing my GPA up quite a bit...

You can do a ton of studying on the long distance transports when your patient falls asleep and to echo what Markobenin stated above, you have to become extremely good with managing your time because you never can really plan to do so many hours of studying in a day as you dont know when your going to get called out and how busy the calls for the day will be.

Its also a good thing to make good friends with someone on another shift so you can swap shifts with them...especially people who have a family - the ones I worked with were very happy to swap a weekday shift for a weekend shift whenever I have an exam coming up.

 

[Compass]

Volunteer. 14 hours a week for me. Unless you need the money. Then look for an EMS group with flexible hours, or part-time. My friend does a 24 and a 12 shift every week.

 

[45408]

Uh, don't work 50 hours a week. I usually did one 24-hour shift on a Friday or Saturday. On rare occasion, I would do two in a week for the cash. I'd also do occasional overnight shifts, because my classes were in the daytime, and I could usually sleep enough to function through the next day.

 

[FirefighterDoc]

I actually do a little bit of both. I go to school full time(14 cred), work as a firefighter/emt-b part time and work as a tech in the emergency room (you wanna do that if you like action, not CNA). Im required to work 20-24 hours a week at the hospital and i sign up for (4) 12 hr shifts per month at the fire dept . At the hospital i work overnights (7p-7a) and sometimes rarely (7p-3a). No school on thursday so i work every wednesday night and sleep thurs. I also commute about an hour to each of my jobs and school( im right in the middle) so i spend about 15 hrs of driving a week.

I work about half my weekends(never Sunday though, thats catch up day for homework).

Dont do what i did last semester. I was full time at the hospital (40 hrs a week) doing 18 credit hours, working part time at the fire dept and driving an hour to all of them. I would often go to class all day and then spend all night at the hospital(7p-7a) with no sleep only to get off and go to 8am class and not get so sleep until i was done with school at 12. i BURNT OUT and my gpa reflects that. So i went part time at the hospital.

Like others have said, i added an extra year to get my degree to compensate for the fact that i have less time to study for all of my classes. Id rather take less at a time and do well in them.(also because i switched to a bio major from nursing and pretty much half of my fresh classes were useless).

 

[ArkansasRanger]

It'd be hard here because all the agencies (public and private) work 24 hour shifts. I did it A LOT when I used to be a high school teacher. I worked 48 hour weekend shifts so 5 days teaching 2 days being a paramedic. I saved lots of dough because of it but had no life for about a year, lol.

Anyway, unless you only worked something less than 24's it's going to be hard to do on a school schedule. Saturdays would be fine with those hours, but on Sundays you never know for certain if you're actually going to leave the station on the time you're "supposed" to.

 

[oaklandguy]

I do a 24 hour shift on Saturdays, during the summer I split it to 3 different 12 hour shifts a week.