Loupes, ahh the topic of many threads here🙂
First off, as a loupe user who purchased them early in dental school, then barely used them for a number of years and then purchased another PROPERLY FIT pair after being out in private practice for a few years, and then purchased another higher magnification pair a year after my 2nd pair, I've had some experience with them over the last dozen or so years since I purchased my 1st pair.
First off, you absolutely 100% DO NOT HAVE to have them as a student, and personally I feel that they'll actually initially slow down the development of your clinical skills with a handpiece. Here's why. As your learning to use the hand piece, not only is it just the slight fine motor skills with your hand, and the indirect vision principles with the hand mirror, but also the need to see how each tooth your working on relates to teeth in other areas of the jaw. Loupes, with their limited field of vision restrict your actual field of view, and this comes into play not only as your learning how to prepare teeth, but when you transfer to live patients the movement of instruments in and out of the oral cavity. As you progress from basic single tooth preparations to multiple teeth restorations both direct and indirect the ability to see the parallellism of teeth over a long span is restricted by the loupes field of view. As your learning, sometimes its not so much the fine detail that the loupes will allow you to see, but the entire picture that may be more important.
"Learning" to use loupes, personally with a properly fit pair, it was very easy. My first pair which were heavy, adjustable, flip down type were very cumbersome, and after wearing them for a few minutes I'd definately notice the wieght on my nose and after a while, it was uncomfortable. Plus many days I'd noramlly end up adjusting the intrapupillary distance and never seem to get it just right. I used those very little and frankly found them to hinder my work and skill development so I basically went from my 4th year of dental school, through residency and 3 years into private practice not using loupes at all.
As I was doing more and more endodontics, I felt advantage of the higher magnification that the loupes provided had significant benefits in locating canals, so I went ahead and did it the correct way this time. i was professional fit by a manufacturers rep AFTER trying out mutliple brands and styles at a large dental convention. My adjustment time was maybe 1 mornings worth of patients, and most of the adjustment was just getting used to transferring the instruments into from outside the loupes field of view to inside the loupes field of view/patient's mouth. This pair I purchased, and still use for most of my work is a pair of 2.5x through the lense orascoptic loupes.
After about a year and a half, and taking an endo course where the exploration of multiple accessory canals was covered, I felt the need for more magnification in my quest to find and clean every canal at I can😀 So I purchased a 2nd pair of orascoptic through the lense loupes, this time in 4.5x which I use essentially exclusively for endo, for both there extra help in finding canals and also since I'm just working on 1 tooth, the very restricted field of view isn't an issue.
In general, after using them, not using them and using them again, they have their benefits, and can be very easy to learn to use. I feel though that learning your basic skills 1st without loupes and then getting a properly fit pair will make your transition to loupes, and hence your dentistry better. Trying to do both at once can be more of a hinderance than a help IMHO.
