AF Educational Leave of Absence & Direct Enlisted Commissioning

[Just_keep_swimming]

Hello all, hoping to find either personnel that have already gone through the educational leave of absence program & direct enlisted commission program or possibly health care recruiters that can assist?

I'm applying to nursing school for next year, I'm really hoping to earn a slot for the nurse enlisted commissioning program, however the only school in my area (about 1 & /2 hrs away, thank you Seattle traffic) meets all reqs is very hard to get into (what school isn't right ?) my back up plan is to also apply to a school literally right up the road, however the only way I could attend it, if accepted, would be to apply for ELAP.

My questions are, if you've gone through the program, what pros/cons did you have? How difficult once through the program to commission? If you couldn't commission directly after, did you go back to your unit & were you immediately expected to remember everything? (I'm in aircraft maintenance) do you continue to accrue active duty time on your enlistment while attending school? Are you deployable? (I'm not in an AEF bucket, I'm a global enabler) can you still test for promotion? (I just sewed on TSgt in May so not eligible until 2015, but figured I'd ask) ok, I will refrain from writing the other 50 questions for now ?

I am still under the GI bill, I have not switched over, I've heard now that if you have, you're not even eligible for ELAP. Ive on,y heard rumors that this program is very difficult to get into, as well as commission after, but I still want to track down all the facts. I've looked for regs & AFIs that cover these but they don't go into specific details, just kind of a brief overview, are there any regs that I can look at?

Any assistance in this is greatly appreciated!

[Just_keep_swimming]

Bump. Just seeing if anyone could help out. Just found out, due to the awesome force shaping the AF is going thru, that I will not be released from my career field in order to apply to my commissioning program. Looking at AFELA as my backup plan, just seeing if anyone else out there has completed the program?