Are you sure about that? Guys/girls who go through OCS/OTS have a 4 year service obligation, but their GI Bill clock starts right away.

When you leave the military, you will be a resident of FL. You can maintain your FL residency as long as you are going to school on the grounds that you "plan on returning to FL" after graduation and therefor do not wish to be a permanent resident in the state of NY. Any point in your schooling you can change your mind and become a NY resident if you wish.

Here is the information from the NY DMV (sources sources sources!):

Definition of a Resident. If you become a resident of NYS, you must exchange your driver license and vehicle registration from another state for a NYS driver license and vehicle registration within 30 days.

Section 250 (5) of the Vehicle and Traffic Law defines the term "resident." The law defines a resident as a person who lives in NYS with the intent to make NYS a "fixed and permanent" place to live. To live in a house, a home, an apartment, a room or other similar place in NYS for 90 days is considered "presumptive evidence" that you are a resident of NYS. A police officer can use this evidence as the reason to issue a traffic ticket if you drive in NYS without a driver license or vehicle registration issued by NYS.

A judge considers the law and the evidence of your intent and decides if you are a resident of NYS. For example, if you pay taxes or your children attend school in another state, a judge considers these facts to decide if your intent is to make NYS a "fixed and permanent" residence. The DMV will not decide if you are a resident of NYS, if you must get a NYS driver license, or if you must register your vehicle in NYS.

According to this law, students from other states or from other nations who attend school in NYS are normally not considered residents of NYS.

http://www.dmv.ny.gov/resident.htm

Does my girlfriend count?

Duke waives the fee for active duty military veterans. H/S won't, and neither will most other top schools. There's a few others that do a bit further down the rankings - Georgetown is one and I'm sure there are others.

Posted from GMAT ToolKit

What's your AFSC? I'm a 62E.

Awesome- very helpful. Thanks!

I don't think it would hurt to contact students now.

Personally, I've always been interested in how active the vets club of each school is, how vets do in the recruiting process, how well vets integrate with the rest of the campus.

Also, some veterans clubs (like HBS for example) are very open to prospective military students e-mailing them for admissions advice.

What do you all think about Harvard's essay questions for this year?

Tell us about something you did well. (400 words)
Tell us about something you wish you had done better. (400 words)

Might make it a little more difficult for nontraditional applicants to tell their story to adcoms... thoughts?

It'll be hard for traditional applicants to tell their story too...maybe even harder, since the experiences of Consultant X from McKinsey are probably almost identical to Consultant Y from Bain. They'll have a hard time differentiating themselves without those extra essays.

Keep in mind military isn't the only source of nontraditional applicants...just in my section alone I had teachers, nonprofit/NGO workers, software engineers, lawyers, and a cheese salesman, among others.

What this change will do is increase the importance of your resume and recommendations as a way of describing your performance and goals relative to your peers. And who knows, maybe they'll decide to start interviews earlier and interview more applicants since adcom won't be spending as much time reading essays. Maybe this is a method of putting more weight on the interview.

I bought the resume book from www.militarytobusiness.com. It has actual resumes from military guys that transitioned to business.