Lyric

"I have a standard for myself, and that’s all I want to meet."

By Students of NYC

April 4^th, 2025

"My first alarm goes off at 3:25 a.m. I like being able to close my eyes and rest a little bit more. But I have to be up by just after 4. It takes two hours to get to school, and the first bus I need to get on before 6 a.m. But it’s worth it. Then I have classes 1–7, and the minute the last bell rings, I go to flag football practice. Practice usually ends after 6 p.m., so I get home around 8:45 or 9 p.m. The first thing I do is sit on my floor. If I touch my bed, I'll fall asleep. So I get out my homework and do whatever I have to related to school, college. I make sure not to touch my bed. If I do that, I’m worried I’ll fall asleep. I do everything school-related on my floor, college stuff, and then watch my films from practice. I like to see what I did well, what I can improve.

I have a standard for myself, and that’s all I want to meet. I want to have good grades. People think my parents must put a lot of pressure on me. They don’t. They have a standard for me too, but once I had a C-plus, and my parents weren’t mad about it. They were just like, hey, this isn’t how you want your grades to be, so what’s going on with you? It’s less of, oh you need to fix this, and more of like, what’s happening to you that it’s this way? They trust me.

Flag football, it’s just so much fun. Sports in general are empowering for young girls. We are super close, and do a lot of talking to each other. If someone comes into the locker room upset about something, we remind them: You’re an athlete. You’re better than this. And we all sit and talk until she feels better and then go out on the field.

I’ve always been excited to go to the doctor, no matter what kind. My parents thought it was so strange. They’d be like, ‘you have a dentist appointment,’ I’d be like, yes! Let’s go! But that’s how I knew I wanted to be in medicine. When I was younger, I thought I could only be a nurse. Then one day I was watching the show 'Blackish,' and the woman was talking about how she was an anesthesiologist. I remember asking my mom, what’s that? And she told me, it’s a doctor. I was like, oh, wow, I can be a doctor. And since then I’ve been researching anesthesiology and I really want to do that myself. Right now, I’m in an NYU program where we get to go to these simulation labs and work on patients who are like real people. They have heartbeats, they talk — everything.

I feel like being a student who grew up in NYC, it makes us better. We’ve experienced so much and our lives are complex. Part of me feels like we’re prepared for the real world. The city is not as forgiving. You gotta figure it out, or you gotta go home. And we always find a way to figure it out. I feel prepared for when I’m an adult and I have to just keep pushing. I love that."