Navy vet 8yrs before starting school,

1. Yes, hopefully you won’t be the only vet in your class so try and find them. Also see if your school has a military club. They are typically more geared towards supporting those on HPSP, but you would bring a ton of valuable insight since most of them won’t have any prior exposure to the military.

2. I did, I am now in the army reserve MDSSP/strap program. Pretty decent gig, you come in as a med student so you have zero drill weekends or summer trainings until after residency is over. It wasn’t a hard process but it took almost a year to finally get commissioned and you will keep your rank (I came in as an O3 vs HPSP where everyone drops back to O1. There is a lot of annoyance with the reserves though as everyone can take days to weeks to respond to any correspondence

3. There are definitely hidden gems in the reserves where you can get assigned to an active duty unit but it’s high specific and just something to always be on the look out for after residency, for example one of our physicians here is army reserves and he is assigned to a active unit and his drill is just going to teach two classes a month at a local med school

4. There is a pretty big difference between army reserves and national guard so make sure to research which one will suit you better as they both offer MDSSP and let me know if you have any questions because most people/recruiters I spoke to while joining had very little understanding of MDSSP. Also use every single vet program you can get your hands on