Pod Casts can be a wonderful way of getting ready to speak with interviewers before you head in. The speakers are using doctor words eloquently and may bring up points that are interesting to you and could inspire a tangential chat between you and your interviewer. They can help you pass the time while waiting outside the interview room and since they require headphones, ensure the other candidates won't freak you out. To be honest, I just had a graphic novel with me that I read while waiting. That kept other candidates far away from me because they figured I was a weirdo.
White Coat Black Art is a fantastic pod cast that often gets at the things that we often think about but rarely talk about, in particular the errors that get made in medicine and how we deal with them and with our patients. These are downloadable from the CBC website or through iTunes.
You can also download the app ReachMD for free. This contains a large selection of pod casts ranging from short 10 minute clips to 3 part lectures that are over an hour long. They have a table of contents based on CME, programming series, specialties (you name it, it's there), Listener's favourites, new programming this week. It's an American radio station on XM satellite but they often have Canadian content experts speaking. This may give you an idea of some of the current topics in the specialty you are applying to that you hadn't thought of yet.
Bump is kind of awesome and fun. It's a way to share data between iPhone users. All I use it for is contacts but it has function for photos, apps, music, calendar and social networks. When you are on tour, you'll be meeting some fantastic people you will want to keep in touch with. Bump lets you share your contact information quickly by bumping your 2 phones together so you can text and meet for a beer after interviews. These are your future colleagues, not your enemies, get to know them. Free app!
Starbucks will be in every city you are applying to. Knowing how to get your coffee in the morning or find a place to chill out the night before will make you a much happier applicant. This app has a mapping feature that will help you find directions to the nearest store and includes valuable information such as hours, if they have wireless, if they're drive through and if they will warm your apple fritter for you. Also free!
There will be times when you are preparing for an interview that you want to know some specific information about the city you are applying to. WolframAlpha is the multi trivia app for you. If you ask about the population of the city in question, it has that info plus graphs on the growth of the city in the past 20 years. It will tell you what is nearby to avoid geographical errors in interviews and allows you to compare to other cities. It also has a scientific calculator, information on weather, people and history, music, words and linguistics, information on the local athletic teams. Everything you could possibly want to know to schmooze with the interviewers. $1.99
You want to have your personal letters and CVs with you at all times on the CaRMS tour. It's likely that at some point you will leave the stack of paper in your car or hotel or at home. Emailing it to yourself is a brilliant idea, but what if you can't get access to the internet in the dungeon the interviews are being held in? Am I the only one who plays out these disaster scenarios in my head? I uploaded all my info to Office2Plus. It lets me keep local files on my phone, create word documents there too while I'm feeling creative and connect with my GoogleDocs Cloud folder. You can keep everything in folders that work best for you. The ability to organize everything and the fact that it mimics my PC make me like this app most of all. The original app is free, but you need to purchase within the app for the kinds of files you are using.
The night before your first interview and your interview at your number one school can be brutal for sleep - relaxation is not going to happen. Still, try Andrew Johnson's Relax. This
is a guided relaxation that can make you feel rested. I love his accent. I used this during clerkship too when I had 20 minutes until handover and didn't get any sleep. It helped keep my going just a little bit longer. There's a free version, not sure about that one, but the one for $2.99 lets you choose if you want to wake up or go to sleep at the end of the relaxation time and has different options for the relaxation itself. If I'm extra wired, I go through the meat of the guide 2x.
xkcd has an app. This will keep your humour high during interviews. These are brilliant comics! omg it's free!
Need to put your life into perspective? FML (f my life) has stories of teenage woe that are rarely worth the curse in the title (free). I prefer TFLN (texts from last night), a series of texts that were sent that likely should not have been, more often than not under the influence of alcohol. This one is $0.99 and infinitely entertaining.
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