Can i have my windows partition on an external drive?

hello all,
     alright, so im looking at a laptop for college and after much research and a few trips to the apple store i want the new, 13-inch macbook pro, with retina display and a 256GB flash hard drive. i love this computer in every aspect except.... you guessed it, its small hard drive. i can always get external drives to make up the differance though, and their is always the cloud so i dont think ill have too much of a problem. but i do need to use some software for college that is only windows based. so rather then splitting up this already small hard drive can i just install windows onto my mac (because i already know i cant put windows on an external drive with boot camp) and make the entire windows partition on the external drive? this way im not losing any native space besides that used to hold windows and im not installing windows to an external drive so hopefully bootcamp wont have a hissey fit. can anyone tell me if this will work? or if this wont work can anyone give me any other solutions to having windows on my mac without splitting up my native hard drive? such as installing windows to my mac and making the partition in the cloud or something? just anything so i dont have to split my already small, yet extremally fast, 256GB hard drive.

You can install Windows on your internal drive and store your Windows data on any drive you want to use. Keep in mind that any Windows programs you install in Windows will be installed on your internal drive. So make the Boot Camp partition large enough for Windows and any programs you may install now or in the future. You will also need room for swap/page files and other activities such as installing Windows updates.
100GB will likely be a good size for the Boot Camp partition given that it is unknown what programs you will be installing.

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