Army HPSP and Dental School.

I have a blog I started after we got married which I kept up until just over a year ago. It became too hard to keep up, and with instagram and chatbooks , it seems pretty easy to use those as a "journal." So, I'm now in the process of turning that blog into some books, then I'm going to close it down and just use this one.

My husband had the idea of me starting this blog to serve two purposes. The first, to serve as information to those who are doing dental/medical through the HPSP program because there is not much out there in the internet world for those of us in this situation. It became really frustrating not having any military contact person when questions arose. The second purpose, just to keep up with our life as an active duty family.

So, with that said, Matt decided to do the HPSP program through the army mainly because they offered a 4 year scholarship. He didn't want to serve on ships so that crossed off the navy. The airforce only offered 3 year scholarships and we didn't want to deal with any large student loans. There are pros and cons to all branches, so I'd suggest researching them to find out what suits you and your family best. The army's HPSP link will be at the end of this post.

Matt was commissioned as a 2nd LT at the end of February or March (I can't remember exactly) in 2011. He had always wanted to serve our country and sometimes wished he had done it during undergrad. Life just hadn't worked out that way though.

During your years in school, you are in the reserves. There is a mandatory ADT (active duty training) every year, but since Matt's schooling was year round, his orders were always just to do what he needed to do as a dental student. During that short period (45 days), he was paid what he'd be paid at his rank if he were active duty. He wasn't required to do BOLC (basic officer training course) during school due to time constraints as well. The rest of the time, we received a monthly stipend of around $2100/month. This helped greatly reduce the amount of loans needed just for living expenses. I stayed at home with our kids during this time and did odd jobs from home here and there. We did, on occasion, need to take out a small amount of loans though. In total, undergrad included, we ended up with just under $31,000 in loan debt. Not too bad for a DDS.

During dental school, military questions would arise, and we didn't really know who to talk to. His recruiter had retired, I believe, and due to the fact that he did the RIDE program at University of Washington, we moved around. His first year was done in Spokane where he was recruited. After that, we moved to Seattle and had absolutely no military contacts. We had issues with receiving our stipend. His "mypay" account wouldn't allow him to change bank accounts for some reason and we always got the run around when trying to call and figure that out. A spouse can't do anything by the way, the service member has to take care of anything military. I had an ID and was able to get discounts at places, but that was about the extent of it.

4th year was a different story, so my following post will be about that.

Here is the link to the Army's HPSP information: http://www.goarmy.com/amedd/education/hpsp.html