USNR_Medicine,
there is a common theme in the forum of mistrust bordering on hostility toward recruiters. unfortunately, the track record of your predecessors is not great-- the path on which you currently tread is littered with the decaying bones of those who came before. like pirates hung in cages at the harbor entry, it should hopefully let you know the environment here. the baseline opinion of the population is skewed by their encounters with other recruiters, and though you may very well be different than the rest it will take some time for you to establish that. as evidence, you can find some previous recruiter threads and long since abandoned accounts-- typically things go ok until some of the party sales pitches come out.
i think recruiters are a good resource for the board, if nothing more than to add in the "official" stance in cases where it may be in question regarding the signup process and rules/regs governing it. hopefully you stick around and can contribute to the forum and help people make informed decisions about their options. for some light background reading you can use the "search" function and see where things have gone awry in the past.
i may even add a sticky as a "guide to recruiters" or something similar. can't hurt. i'm sure this forum has some kind of visibility in the recruiting world (where all the secret data you mentioned in your post is kept) if for no other reason than we are in the top 4 google hits for hpsp and military medicine related searches. we are the longest lived independent community that people can utilize, and i hope if nothing else creates a more educated HPSP student body. this forum did not exist for my generation (i lurked in 1999, joined in 2000, by then my fate was sealed) but i like to think if it had we'd have avoided a lot of disgruntled embittered doctors. at least to the degree that lies and misrepresentations contribute to the embitteredness, lol.
--your friendly neighborhood you need a thick skin but please stick around caveman
