#nylf

So we did this at med camp and I'm crying

alrighty! welcome to the first installment of my educational journey!!! right now i'm at NYLF's Berkeley Medicine and Healthcare program!

so let's get some shit off my chest already, even though we've only been here for like 3 days (i'll post my 3rd day later). first off, it is so interesting to see in real life the formation of social groups with other people my age. like day one we we're all still feeling each other out and just trying to make it through the night, dinner, and the orientation assembly. like, i have never had so many blonde, blue-eyed, country, white girls in my face before...usually (being that i live in florida) that is a telltale sign that you are either

A. about to be tokenised to an each of your life or,

B. you're about to be verbally hatecrimed.

so imagine these girls' surprise when i said i was from florida in my slight country accent! i saw right immediately on their faces that they thought i was an oddityyyyyyy!!!!! like a science experiment not yet possibly thought offffff!! like i know i'm whitewashed to hell and back but DAMN....was not expecting these girls to start quizzing me about where i'm 'really' from....

second thing i want to get off is how unfriendly and competitive a lot of the black girls are here...like damn i thought we were in this together. it was really disheartening to see how some of us were FLOCKING to these predominantly white spaces and then treating the rest of our fellow black girls like they were trash! i can't tell you the amount of times i've gotten dirty looks from a fellow black girl when i interact with any of their white friends (can you even call it that? were only here for 7 days?)! what makes it worse is that some of their friends are nice to me and they REFUSE to even give common decency to any girl that looks just like them...

but not only that...y'all can fyrefest (ironic considering the news today) happen even with berkeley? this place is actually so busted ad disorganised...like half of our counselors aren't even anywhere near medicine...yet we're supposed to consider them nurses? also, our head honcho, ms. joker as i will be calling her, is very....animated and opinionated.

like, yesterday we were supposed to walk to the real berkeley campus and take a group picture. what happened in reality was that she didn't feel like walking so she just...cancelled the whole thing. keep in mind all of us paid over 5k to be here and to experience the medical world...and before you think 'wow true you sure know how to exaggerate!' this has come directly from the horse's mouth. i asked ms. joker whether or not we were walking and i got that exact response! so...yeah. go NYLF!

day 2 was mostly just like 20-25ish kids all crammed into one room to listen to our counselor talk about stuff in these REALLY cheap textbooks...but our counselor is nice and AN ACTUAL MEDICAL STUDENT!!!!

the food is subpar at best, public school food at worse so. yeah. i mean we are in california so everything is health-conscious in theory...so i mean it basically tastes like hotel food!

i've met some pretty nice people here though so i can't pretend that i'm not having some fun. i think none of us are neurotypical in the slightest and you know what? it's really swag. we can be very blunt with each other and not get offended!!!