I don't remember how much I outlined of my summer plans in my other post about summer, so forgive me if I repeat myself because for some reason, I still want to talk about it. (Why do I want to even post about my summer plans anyway???) This summer, one of the things I plan to do is get a waitressing job so that I can add "clinical" (A.K.A. people interaction) experience for my application for medical. The medical school I want to go to (A.K.A. my dream medical school or my number one choice for medical school) requires applicants (applicants? applicans!) to have clinical experience, which one would think means doctors offices, hospitals, nursing homes, or other medical offices or places, but they don't count any job or activity in a medical atmosphere as clinical experience. What the school is really looking for is mainly interaction with people--nitty-gritty, pain in the neck, patience-testing interaction. They want to see how you act in situations where you want to shout at or wring the necks of people you're serving in some shape or form because medicine is not a magical job where you automatically don't feel those urges with difficult patience. You most certainly do, but as someone patients are supposed to be able to completely trust with their health--their lives--you need to keep those urges in check so that your patients do trust you and are comfortable with you. The point of this is that your clinical experience must be interactive with patience. Job shadowing doesn't count. Some sort of office worker position in the back of the office, working with files, won't count. I'm not even sure scribe positions count. As a result of these sorts of jobs being hard to come by in medical setting due to privacy rights and the fact that there are already positions like this being filled by other hospital staff, it's often hard(, we are told,) to get these sorts of positions. As an alternative (and for people who absolutely need paying jobs since most medical offices won't hire a college student to do the work a nurse who's already being paid is doing), waitressing or waiting and hostessing or hosting are good options because those jobs certainly test your patience and force you to interact with people. Therefore, I'm not even going through the trouble of trying to find a job in settings where they're already supposed to be tough to get. I'm going straight for waitressing for the summer. I was thinking about finding a volunteer position in a medical setting. I thought if an office won't hire a college student to do nursing work, they might kindly let me volunteer some hours during the week for the experience. However, my father looked up prices of medical school applications, submitting AMCAS (American Medical College Application Service), and sending MCAT scores to different medical schools, and he said that I will need a job because he and my mother cannot afford that in such a small amount of time. Therefore, waitressing it is. I applied at a restaurant Monday. I'm waiting to hear back now. Supposedly, the manager/owner was out of town this week, so it will take longer than usual to hear back. I'm trying to figure out after how much time I should give up and try another restaurant and/or whether I should call or stop at the restaurant to ask if anyone looked at my application and made a decision. (That's how my father got his first job after graduating from college!) I have one or two other restaurants in mind for now. Then, I'll either figure out more restaurants OR apply to work at a hotel. I have a friend who works at a hotel, though, and she doesn't think a hotel will hire me since I'm only interested in summer work. When school starts, I'll be driving two hours a day to school and back, so on top of that and homework, working would be too much in my opinion. I'm going into my last year of college, and I haven't worked yet. Therefore, I don't think I should worry about it this late in the game. I don't need it monetarily. I only might need it to add to my medical school application, but since they're due this fall and winter, I don't think it will help much. I'll know for sure in July when I go to my dream medical school for an advising appointment. Wish me luck with that, please--that I won't have to do much more than I already have, especially since the application for that school is due at the beginning of August since I'm applying for early decision! That's before school starts for me again!!!!! That's insane to me because there are things I have to get from professors at my school, and I don't know if they'll be on campus over the summer. The professor I have to contact about it all stopped answering my e-mails for now--ahsdfksjflksjflsjflksjfls. !!! Whoops, my crazy, stress-induced side came out of me.(-;
Continuing my summer plans...I'm going to Utah for a couple days at the beginning of August for a leadership conference. I'm excited. I've never traveled out of state without my parents (at the very least my mother), especially not that far. The farthest I've ever traveled out of state (with my parents or at least mother) is either Florida or Texas. If we've ever been anywhere farther, I was too young to remember. We lived in California and Maryland when I was one or two, but I definitely don't remember that. It wasn't for a long time either. I also haven't been on an airplane since I was that young. I'm excited and nervous. I'm excited to travel and see new places, even though I won't be getting out much and I'll be travelling two days and staying there another two), but I'm nervous to go so far alone in such a seemingly risky way. I hear about so many plane crashes, and it really scares me. Sure, car accidents happen more often than plane crashes, but I feel as if there's a larger chance of surviving a car accident than a plane crash. You're not hurdling to the hard ground or deserted water from thousands of feet in the air in a car crash. It's scary to me.
My plans besides those two are helping my grandparents with my grandmother's husband's appointments and bringing my grandmother to the store. I love driving, and they live about half an hour away. I also have the reward of feeling the way you do when you help people less fortunate than you. It feels even more rewarding when they're people who love you and have done so much for you in the past. I have my opinions of how my grandmother and her husband or living, but I don't know every aspect of what they go through. It's also not my place to judge. The bottom line is this is my grandmother who has done SO much for me over the years. She's in a place where she's much happier but unfortunately less fortunate, so I can contribute to making the rest of her life a little more fortunate. I love them. They love me. It's the least I could do. I don't want to be taken advantage of, but it's worth the risk. Innocent until proven guilty--I should not treat my grandmother and her husband badly because of what they could do to me. I should treat them based on the present (and honestly, a lot of the past since she has done so much for my family).
More plans include continuing the Harry Potter series. I'm a late newcomer. I hated reading growing up. It's been my weak subject since middle school. Little Miss Pre-Medical High School Valedictorian had straight Cs in middle school in reading, and reading has always been her lowest score on standardized tests (ACT and MCAT). I missed something in reading somewhere along the way. It might be really late in the game to try to fix it, but if practice makes perfect for reading, it's better late than never because it will only become increasingly more frustrating as time goes on. Therefore, I'm bettering myself and doing it with something I really do like. I like the Harry Potter series. I don't care for supernatural and magical stuff. I like realistic stories. However, I personally find J. K. Rowling sets up the wizarding world of Harry Potter as very similar to the real world as we know it. The only twist is the people have magic powers. Would you call it magic powers? Should I say, '"The people are magical"? You might think I say, "The only twist...," as if it's a minor detail when in fact it's a huge detail, but the people in Harry Potter's magical world aren't very different from us people-wise. If you've read the series, I think you'll know what I mean. Their magic doesn't make them impossible-to-comprehend sort of different. Their lives are only seemingly more efficient because they can get some things done with magic when we have to do it manually. Describing the way J. K. Rowling portrays witches and wizards and the magical creatures in their world makes me realize something. Maybe it's something she intended for her readers to ponder. Because someone is different from us in some ways, they are not necessarily completely different from us. Maybe she intended for her readers to extract a lesson, message, moral of tolerance from her story, maybe not. Maybe I'm over-analyzing things as I so often do. However, I think this is a good over-analysis as opposed to my typical over-analyses.(: I'm on Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix right now, by the way. Last summer, the last book I finished was Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I started The Order of the Phoenix last summer, but I didn't finish it before school started again. Then, with school, I got too busy to read, so I forgot much of what I read and restarted. That process of starting and restarting The Order of the Phoenix happened several times during the semester because I was determined to keep up with it during the semester, but--ha, the semester--I got too busy and too tired and exhausted and stressed to keep up with it and school. This past spring semester (along with each previous semester since the stress of each effected the next like a domino effect) is another story of its own.
Okay, last of my plans (Maybe I can condense the rest into a final somewhat short paragraph since this post is already crazy long.) include watching TV series I have left to watch. I have many I'd like to watch from beginning to end, but since I won't have time to do all of them (maybe not even more than one) with everything else I have to do this summer, I'm focusing mainly on One Tree Hill. I'm late to that, too, and I love Naley, Bucas (my own ship name for Brooke and Lucas because it's FUNNY to me), and Pake (Jeyton? Jayton? Jaketon? LOL. Peyke? PEYTON AND JAKE, OKAY?). Dan Scott ruins lives. I do not like him (Who does anyway?). I might end up liking Deb. Hmm, anything else? YES. Chris Keller is A JERK. Rachel and Brooke are too shallow and promiscuous. Hmm...anything else? I'm on season three, so my opinions might change later. These are my opinions now, though.
Another one of my plans is for me and my boyfriend to go on a short vacation together. By short I mean a couple or a few days. I also should have added small vacation because I don't mean only a short vacation but also not a very extravagant one. I don't want him to have to spend a lot for it. I only want us to be alone for a few days where we can get the food we like to eat when we go out. We don't need to go far for me to be happy. I'd like a nice hotel (BEST WESTERN PLUS! That's the best hotel I've been to so far.) in a city that's not dangerous but has things to do (Wingstop, Wingstop, Wingstop. Olive Garden. Auntie Anne's? Outback. Burger King. Taco Bell.). I want us to have options we like and possibly more than we need because I cannot predict for what I'll be in the mood when we go. If we go.): I hope we do. We got to spend nights together for the first time last summer, and it was without parental supervision. I don't think his parents would ever supervise us, but I totally would have expected mine to do so. However, they did not.(: They let me spend three days and two nights with him without them. We went with some of his friends to a comic convention. I'm not into comic conventions, but I wasn't passing the opportunity to have that time alone with him. It was mostly wonderful. All of our quality time together was wonderful. What wasn't wonderful was the hotel commodities/accommodations and the food. Wi-fi wasn't free, and there was no free breakfast. The city was walk to get everywhere and no Burger King, Taco Bell, Outback, Olive Garden, or Wingstop was near. There was a strip mall connected to the hotel, but the food court options sucked. The one thing I liked was overpriced, and the rest of what I liked were more snack foods than lunch and dinner/supper OR BREAKFAST. I don't even know what I ate if I ate breakfast those days. It sucked in that sense, lol. I think he was unsatisfied with the same things with which I was unsatisfied --most of them at least. For example, I don't know if no free breakfast or no free Wi-fi bothered him. I don't know if he disliked the food court as much as I did. OOH. I also did not enjoy sleeping with him very much.): It was much more uncomfortable than when we fall asleep on the sofa together at my house. He said it was because it was hot in the hotel room. Maybe it was, but I remember being uncomfortable with where his arms were and mine were when we were spooning to fall asleep. However, when we spoon on the sofa at my house, it's totally comfortable? Maybe/hopefully, he was right. That or a bed is too soft for cuddling and spooning that close to be comfortable and the relatively greater firmness of a sofa makes it comfortable? I'm not sure. I know we were both uncomfortable sleeping together, which really sucked for our first nights together.))):
Okay, this post is done, yay! Also, somewhat not yay because I didn't even get to talk about my opinions and insight on friends and relationships in high school versus college!): This post is so long already that I'm not comfortable making it any longer. Even less people will read it then.(; Therefore, I'll talk about that another time.(: Thanks to those of you who read!! You should click on the post itself so that I can see how many people do (or don't (;) read my posts. Thanks in advance for that, too!
