Help me find a company.

A couple of pieces of advice.
1. Do not restrict yourself to autos. Now days if you test in an auto, you will have a restriction to only autos.
2. Pay out of pocket, at the end of the year you'll be making more as most training companies pay scale is low.
3. Why not pay a school a refresher fee to drive the truck a few hours over the weekend and go test?

 

Post location.

@Chinatown

 

I heard prime is teaching with autos at their school

 

I think R.E. West pays you while in school, but not positive.
Their cdl school is free and there's no contract to sign.
Call and ask about the transmission.
Their dry van division runs all over the country hauling hot water heaters and some other stuff.

 

If money is that tight; just flip a coin and go with Schneider dry van or Roehl refrigerated.
After your contract is fulfilled and if you still want to run the roads, hire on with a reefer outfit that runs west coast.
Personally, I never tired of running long haul coast to coast. That's a good fit for me. Saw the country coast to coast and border to border and liked what I saw in Nevada, so moved there from my home state of Tennessee.

 

Autos are nice, but I def would want the experience of a manual.

 

Those days will soon be over. Auto shifting will become the way as it reduces cost on maintenance. No more burned clutches, a driver can creep more slowly than a manual trans.

 

FFE gave me a 250 dollar "gift card" after I finished my second week in their school.
It paid for some food, fuel home on the weekends, some dip, and part of my car payment. I had savings from sold utility stock but a lot of people were grateful to have it.

I don't know if that's going to be enough for you. But I hear Roehl will pay you while you are in school if you can get approved with them. I think like $500 per week. That's what I earned training for 6 weeks, then after that I went on to earn 1500 per week driving team for them. The training pay didn't really concern me because I knew the work pay would be a lot better for what I was willing to do.

Also if you want to drive a truck just save your money. You don't need that much and you should save anyway because you are going to have good weeks and bad so learn the skill now.

FFE taught me in a manual transmission but their fleet is only automatic transmissions for the most part. You could lease a manual and if they rent a truck out to you get a load somewhere it might be an automatic or not depend on if its available. Just learn to shift, you will probably not have to use it but you might in some circumstances. It's hard to learn at first but then it clicks. Then later you get to learn again without a trainer coaching you when you finally get to drive one and you can grind the gears into nothing and you just say it was like that already. LOL. Or you can say you grinded them and they probably wouldn't care. It's up to you.