Wow - so many helpful replies. Thank you all so much.
I just emailed the ROO at UIC with some of the questions that were suggested and also some of my own. That article was really interesting - the James McKinney mentioned seems to be the only UChicago student to do ROTC in recent years. I plan on emailing my regional admissions rep. for UChicago to ask if he knows anyone at the university to whom I could speak.
goaliedad - I also noticed that UChicago is not specifically listed as a satellite school and I haven't been able to find an answer as to why it isn't. I figured it was probably due to low participation but I'm not sure.
I am OOS at UVM (I'm from DC). I emailed the ROO at UVM last night and have exchanged several email with him this morning. He said "Congrats on the 3 year scholarship" so I'm assuming that's what I was awarded, even though I haven't gotten my letter yet. I'm not as familiar with the 3 yr award - would I contract at the beginning of my soph. year instead of at the beginning of my freshman year? Is that the only difference?
He also told me that the chances of transferring the scholarship to an expensive private school are effectively non-existent, echoing what many said here. I do love UVM, but Chicago is also an amazing school.
I don't know what my major will be, but I'm interested in neuroscience and law. I also want to learn German and Arabic and I love writing (hence why I applied to Middlebury). Chicago has a lot more majors that I would be interested in exploring. At Vermont, I have enough AP credits to knock off a year of school.
I wish I could visit again, but unfortunately I just don't think there's enough time (plus the cost of last minute plane tickets). I did an overnight at both schools but neither one was a fantastic experience so I didn't really learn much. I sat in on a class at Chicago but not UVM and found that I was able to follow the material (analysis of Democracy in America).
One last question - Does anyone have any experience with gap years? I'm assuming that if I were to take a gap year (which would most likely be spent working as an au pair & learning German), I would lose the scholarship. Would deferring affect my participation as a walk-on the following year? Thanks in advance for the help.
I'm going to start with a couple of assumptions here:
1) Financially, you can attend either school with or without the ROTC scholarship.
2) You want to serve Active Duty when you finish school.
Money aside, I can see why you would want to go to U of C. You pay a lot, you get a lot both in the academic experience (less self-serve vending machine as mentioned above) and the social experience (facilities, the student body is closer to your expectations).
The ROTC experience at U of C would be one of your own making. You mentioned the dearth of people going this path. There are very good reasons. First, I think I've figured out why U of C is not listed on the Army site - the Army site only lists schools where ROTC has an official presence (i.e. they have staff on campus and the campus recognizes ROTC as part of their academic curriculum). You may have noticed that Harvard is now back in ROTC which means that the program is officially recognized by Harvard, whereas before this change, you could attend Harvard and participate in ROTC at MIT, but Harvard didn't acknowledge your participation. I get the feeling that U of C doesn't officially "support" ROTC. In other words, you are on your own to make it work. If you have to miss class Friday to go to FTX, professors are not required to give you a break on the test that day. You must negotiate that yourself.
That being said, I'm glad to see you are inquiring as to how to make it work. The logistics of getting to and from 2 campuses for required classes/activities is the first problem you must solve. And you need to understand how much time that is going to take out of your day. And the saw about U of C being the place where fun goes to die is very true. It is a very very true statement as the classes there are known for having very heavy work loads. It is uber-competitive for grades as the student body isn't known for spending its weekends with a beer in hand. This is important to know because grading is far more competitive than at UVM.
Where this comes into play is under the assumption that you will need to get the approval the PMS to contract at the beginning of your Junior year. The PMS is given a target for X number of 2nd Lts in Y year. Everyone with a scholarship in the unit and is in good standing at that point is automatically counts against that target. Then they look for walk-ons (what you will be essentially without a scholarship). They score them on a number of things from GPA to APFT scores to participation in unit events and teams. This is where going to U of C (as compared to UIC) puts you at a disadvantage. If the UIC kid has a 3.5 and you have a 3.0 (tougher to get than you think at U of C), and the UIC kid is on campus to participate in color guard and what not, and has a reasonable APFT (270 plus), my bet is the UIC kid getting the contract and your getting walking papers.
I'm not saying this to scare you, but to make it clear that the U of C choice ups the level of competition on so many levels that you better have supreme confidence that you have everything worked out before going that route.
Turning to UVM, I think you mentioned that you have a boatload of AP credits which you could use to shorten your stay. I recommend against that for a couple of reasons. First, it is very difficult to get sequences of classes completed, especially in science disciplines (you mentioned your interest in neuorscience). Second you also mentioned interest in foreign languages which also have long sequences of courses). I encourage you to take a full 4 years and perhaps double major (a science and a language - you won't have enough time to do 2 languages) to satisfy your broad interests. Preparing for law school is something you would also have more time for in 4 years - primarily taking writing intensive courses where critical thinking is developed. The LSAT test is not well prepared for in college.
One last thought about UVM - Given that you are in the upper part of the admitted class, you will probably have a better chance of having a top GPA (given a solid work effort of course) which in turn would put you higher up the OML when it comes time to decide where you go for your first assignement. If being sent to Germany (a very competitive location) is important, you will need to do an ADSO (add 3 years to your AD time required) to stand a good chance of getting there and even then you need to be higer up the OML to use that.
Point here is that in the Army, everything is scored, and the better you can engineer your college experience to maximize that score, the better choices you will have. And the Army doesn't care that you went to U of C. GPA is considered the same from either school.
You have to decide whether the risks to your goal to commission is worth it to go your own way at U of C for the experience. Think about it for a while and feel free to throw out your thinking.