I had forgotten about this form, thanks for reminding me Antoinette. I've been in Baghdad for 4 fun filled months now, not that bad overall.
They've been tinkering with summer training for years now, trying to match the current theatre of operations and what not. COL Curry, the director of DMI, was a mentor of mine at USMA and I know he's put a lot of great work to try to make the training relevant, so I'm sure it would be great.
As far as "schools" I would recommend, I'll go through the three requirements I had, dont know if this has changed as we only had to do one Army School (such as Airborne, Air Assault, Sapper, schools that the Army, not USMA, ran).
I would start by saying that in my experience, the best CST leadership details for someone interested in Infantry would either be CFT2 squad leader or platoon leader. That was an invaluable experience for me.
As far as a CTLT goes, post doesnt matter, only branch. You need to do something you're going to like. The one thing I would add is avoid a unit that just came back from deployment, as there will be no training going on, avoid a unit at JRTC or NTC, as you wont be able to do much training because the real PL needs that training, and avoid the desire to go to a post because it's high speed, focus instead on branch. Any unit will work if they're doing valuable training, best way to find out what units are doing what is to look at the Army times and see when units are coming and going from theatre or talk with recent grads who are at said post.
As far as schools go, for an infantry LT I would say it all depends on what you want. Airborne is good to knock out because you have to do it as an LT if you're not already qualified, so knocking it out at USMA means you can get out of Benning faster as an LT. The downside is that if you go to Ranger as an Airborne qualified Ranger, you'll jump 3 times, and that's just three more chances to hurt yourself (trust me, it'd been over three years since I'd jumped between airborne and Ranger and I was sure I was going to kill myself when I jumped). I hear Air Assault is a waste of time, and I'm in the only Air Assault division in the world and still havent gone, so I really cant comment on that. I hear the real hidden gems are schools like Northern Warfare, the Sandhurst exchange (I hear that is an incredible MIAD, the training is superb and the experience is irreplacable), Mountain Warfare, basically the schools that dont have tabs or badges. Everyone I've known who went to those schools said there were very valuable in the fact that you legit learn a skill you normally wouldnt have and you see interesting places and deal with Soldiers from the Army. Everyone wants to go to Sapper because of the Tab, but what good does a Sapper tab do you as an Infantry officer? It's a great school, but go because you think it might help you for Ranger (it wont, Ranger will suck no matter what), or because you're interested in the ciriculum. Same goes for SFAS; you're going to have to go again as an O if you want to go SF, so dont go just to say you're bad ass. One school that I hear is great is CDQC, but you have to be a great swimmer to handle that. I bring up that course because theres really no way you'll get it in the Army unless you're in Ranger Regiment or SF, so if swimming is your thing and you want to drown, go for it, you probably wont get the chance again.
The bottom line is that it depends what you want to do, where you want to post, and what you think would be best for you. My only major advice that West Point gives you some great opportunities you wont get in the Army, so takes those up if you can.
