Hey guy's I know you all are really excited about next year, you should be, it's great! I have tried to give you all sound advice, and if you haven't listened that's ok, but listen to me here....
When you all come they are going to give you a list of stuff to buy, opthalmoscope, otoscope, tuning forks, etc, etc. They will try to sell you on buying your stuff through the schools WelchAllyn rep....DON'T AND I MEAN DON'T DO IT! They absolutely ripped us off this year, I don't know if someone is getting a kickback or what. Me and a couple of my friends ordered our stuff through
www.steeles.com and they were great. Allheart has stuff too, but their customer service sucks. You can actually call steeles some of the other sites are email only.
They (when I say they, I mean the rep the school hooks you up with) are going to try to pressure you to buy a panoptic, you don't need it, people in my class are pissed, they spent an extra x hundreds of dollars and we've used them once, and you don't need them anyway, you can use your opthalmoscope. They're also going to try and get you to buy the WelchAllyn stethescope, don't, for the money you spend you can buy a Littmann and they are 10x better. This year it really came off like used car salesmanship.
So here's what you do:
1) go to a uniform shop and get your stethescope, you can just get a Littmann Ultralite, because you don't know how to use a good one yet anyway.
2) go to
www.steeles.com or another non-shady site/store to get your equipment, get the most basic kit you can. DON'T get the new style otoscope head, when you start using it you'll realize that it fogs up all the time and is basically as useful as a paper weight. By ordering it through another place like steeles you are going to save about 400-500 dollars. So it's well worth it. And if you don't have it the first day of class you can always borrow someones until it comes in.
I just wanted to get this out to you all, make sure the word gets circulated, post it on your facebook whatever, I just don't want the same thing to happen to you all that happened to us. Cheers!