You need to ask yourself a couple of important questions to figure out what you are going to do.
1. Do you have to do 911 somewhere near where you are now? Or are you willing to move?
2. Are you willing to work EMT full time?
3. Would you be willing to do nursing home transfers for a few months to then do 911?
4. Are you willing to go through fire fighter training?
The answers to those questions have a huge impact on how hard it is to find some where to work.
Also I'd be skeptical of the value of working with a volunteer fire department, especially if you are only doing it for a short time. Most volunteer departments are in small towns that can't afford a full time fire department. Some of the volly departments that we ran with when I was a full time EMT were doing like 50 medical calls a year, so if you were one of 4 EMTs you run about 12 calls a year. My ambulance was running about 20 calls a week.
I'm not ripping on vollys, If there is a volly department near something else you want to do then go for it if it'd be fun. But if you want significant medical experience you need to be working full time as an EMT. You should be willing to consider other options like being a tech in an ED or working amusment parks.
I don't know what some of the above posters are talking about in terms of "most big departments have volunteers." Most big departments are staffed by full time firefighters, EMTs, and medics. You aren't going to be volunteering and running calls with FDNY, LAFD, Chicago fire etc. Do they have a programs where you can volunteer in other capacities? Maybe, but running medical calls with a "big department" as a volunteer is, um, a rare experience.
And as to the above advice about not taking the driving class so you can play in the back:
1: Driving lights and siren is one of the more fun parts of being an EMT.
2: If you are paired with a medic they are on the ALS calls, so all you can do is drive.
3: You tend not to get very far with volunteer organizations by saying "yeah, you want me to do that class but I don't feel like it." You also drop yourself farther down on the list of valuable members. If I'm going out the door and I have room for one EMT and two are in the station, one who can drive and one who can't, who do you think I'm going to take? Not the one who assumes that by avoiding class I'm going to drive to the hospital so he can be in back.
