Welcome back, Rush! Let me be one of the first to welcome the class of 2013! Make sure you guys register for the website as soon as your Rush email is working and don't forget to join the Class of 2013 group when you register. No worries if you forget though, since you can always join later.
Since we've added a bunch of great new features over the summer, I'm going to go ahead and do a brief tour that will introduce everyone to the exciting stuff now available on our website. RMstudents really has a lot to offer students in many areas of life at Rush.
- Classified Ads: This is one of the new features we're most excited about. You can now buy and sell things with other Rush students in the RMstudents Classified Ads! Sell a book, buy a new piece of furniture, or even post Wanted Ads all in one place. You can keep track of ads via the Classified Ads feed. (Don't know what RSS is? Watch RSS in Plain English ) What are you waiting for? Start selling!
- Event Calendar: RMstudents now has an Event Calendar! Tired of trying to keep track of all the lunch meetings and after school activities available at Rush? Now there's a centralized location to keep track of all the information for you. It's even available in iCalendar format, so you can add it to your personal calendar in Outlook, iCal, Thunderbird, or Google Calendar (to name a few). We're going to need everyone's help to keep this calendar up to date though! So, do you have an event that you'd like to invite everyone to? Add it to the calendar today! You can always adjust it later if things change.
- Groups: We have a bunch of groups already in the RMstudents Group Directory. Groups can use the website to promote themselves to others and exchange information between their members. We're really hoping that this part of the website will take off this year with some of our other new features like the Event Calendar. Are you part of a group that's already on the website, but you need to update your leadership? Do you want to get your group onto RMstudents? Check out the directory, and join your groups today.
- Create and Share: Have you made something you think your classmates might benefit from? Like, say you made this great list of all the bold terms in the Histo syllabus or find a video depicting the Krebs cycle on YouTube. You should share it with everyone! Just try to keep it relevant. Keep off-topic stuff to Facebook or the forums.
- Lecture Recordings: Please see the Lecture Recordings page.
- Student Life: Don't forget that there is life outside of the classroom. We've added a News Feed Aggregator to compile a stream of what Rush med students are doing online (also as an RSS feed). Do you have a personal website, blog, photo stream, podcast, etc.? If it has a feed (RSS, Atom, or RDF) and you'd like to share it with the rest of us, request that we add you to the Aggregator using our Contact Form.
- Get Technical Advice: Learn some technical tips and tricks that will help make your school life easier, such as bypassing Lotus Notes for Gmail.
- Learn from the Past: Starting a new year is always nerve-wracking. Luckily Rush has a lot of students who have paved the way before you, and we're all about giving you a way to learn from the past via our self-composed Handbooks. We've got the M1 Survival Guide, M3 Survival Guide, and M4 Survival Guide. Each must be approved by the OMSP and thus they're immutable. All the other books are community editable (like a wiki).
- And more: You can do a bunch of other cool stuff like view our photo gallery (the gallery has been disabled), start up conversations in the forums, and even start your own blog. Although if you're serious about blogging, you might be better off on a dedicated blogging site like Wordpress (highly recommended), Blogger, or Typepad. If you do that, we'd be happy to add your feed to our Aggregator.
- See something we don't have?: Contact us and suggest it. We're always looking for new and interesting ideas from anyone.