I did this in North Carolina. I moved there in June, started school in August, paid out-of-state tuition for the first year (got a waiver for one semester), then was approved for in-state status for the rest of school, but it depends completely on the state. You're going to have to research what your state and university's policies are to get the answer to your question. For instance, in Montana, you have to live in the state for one year and take no more than 6 credits every semester during that year before they'll even consider you for in-state status. In a DPT program, you could never pull that off unless you moved a year in advance. In North Carolina, I had to have one year's physical presence in the state as a minimum requirement, but then they had a long list of questions they considered that made it more or less likely I would be approved. They weren't trying to figure out if I would stay in NC after graduation (lots of students, resident and not, get out-of-state jobs after graduation) so much as they were trying to consider the "whole picture" to figure out if my "real" residence was somewhere else. These are some of the questions I remember from the application:
In what state is your car registered?
In what state are you licensed to drive?
Do you own a house? If so, in what state?
In what state is the bank where you hold your bank account?
Do you have any personal possessions residing in another state? If so, what % of your personal possessions are there?
In what state did you file your most recent tax return?
In what state are you registered to vote?
In the past year, have you left the state? If so, where did you go, why, and for how long?
Where does your spouse/significant other reside?
You get the idea. A student who packed up their essentials in their car but left the majority of their stuff in their parents' basement, never registered their car in the new state, never changed their driver's license, and goes to their home state during summer breaks to work is pretty obviously not a true resident because they've maintained all their ties to their old state and haven't formed any permanent ties to the new state. For a non-traditional student, if you own a house in another state and your spouse/kids all still live there while you rent a rinky-dink apartment in the new state, again, it's pretty obvious you aren't a true resident. If you were, your wife and kids would have come with you. A person who's planning a truly permanent move (even if school is what caused it) gets all these things changed over. Hence the reason they include all those questions on the application. If your state is at all similar, getting all the above things done will help your case, but the first step is to research your state. Good luck!
