So I apologize in advance because I didn’t write down stuff every day so all of this comes from memory.

Day 0:
Sunday is technically Day 0 because we didn’t do too much… I arrived with my roommate, Kevin Yang(you’ll find out later why I state his last name) at around 4:00. By the time we got into our room, it was 4:30. We headed straight to the UNCG dining place. The food was pretty good and I enjoyed it. We went to our first rehearsal at 6:15(I think) and it was super fun. We played 5 pieces: Brave Spirit, Fireburst Fanfare, Encanto, Byzantine Dances, and Destined To Fly. During rehearsal, we went through general logistics, sightread all of our pieces(which you can bet sounded absolutely horrible), and met our conductor, Tracy Humphries. After that, we went back to our dorms and had a meeting with our RA. I was warned that I would sleep horribly and we also were given general rules to follow. I also met Kevin Hu, speedyfalcon, hello_12, Sarah Coltrane, Julie Ye, Victoria Smith, Victoria Li, Caroline Huang, and Aidan Huang, all of whom are from my school.

As our RA had warned us, I slept HORRIBLY. I woke up at 1 am, 3 am, and finally 5:30 am. It was one heck of a night, but I had a decent amount of energy after a nice and chilled Starbucks frappucino.

Day 1-4:
After a decent breakfast, which had a fairly large amount of iced tea incorporated into it(I lived on caffeine the entire camp), we went to rehearsal at 8:30. Our conductor gave us schedules and stuff and we finally went to work. I don’t remember which specific songs we worked on, but we worked on one or two songs. It still was nowhere near concert-ready because the conductor couldn’t get the trumpets to follow the SIMPLEST DIRECTIONS! As the weeks progressed, our music sounded more and more like the actual piece and sounded like real music. I got the 15 measure flute solo in Brave Spirit and got the soli in Brave Spirit as well. It was very cool.

After rehearsal, we had Musicianship, where we met our instructor, Brian Carter. He was super chill but his class was kind of boring. Tbh it was the only class where I actually learned something, but yeah.

Now came lunch. On normal days, I ate a plate of nachos, some yogurt, and some veggies. We can’t forget a cup of tea. It was really chill and kinda fun. I met a lot of new people there, including Irene Xu(some mathcounts kid who wanted to talk to me apparently?), Henry Ulsian(subscribe to his channel), and Caroline Chen(a percussionist who doesn't do school band apparently) so yeah…

After lunch came another rehearsal(note I’m doing days 1-4 because they were literally the same every day). We learned a lot more musical stuff and it was really fun. The conductor made a lot of band related jokes such as “How do you define perfect pitch? Throwing a piccolo into the toilet without hitting the rim.”

Right after the second rehearsal came FREE TIME. On the first day, we got boba from Boba House and on the second-to-last day we(the group of kids from our school) got a smoothie from Smoothie King. It was really fun, but I spent the majority of my free time playing Geometry Dash in my dorm. I really enjoyed the two hours of relaxation because I REALLY needed it, as rehearsal was usually really boring for us flutes.

Next up, DINNER. Dinner was pretty much always Nachos, veggies, BBQ pork, sometimes rice, and TEA. I talked to a lot of the carnage kids, as well as the other friends I made such as Irene, Henry, etc.

At around 5:45 pm, we had sectionals. Sectionals was basically just a half-hour where flutes practiced our songs by themselves. The rehearsal assistants helped us out, and we managed to guilt trip one of them into buying us candy.

Right after sectionals was our third, and final, rehearsal. The rehearsal was the one that most of the trumpets clowned their butts off in, as they were tired and didn’t want to actually play their instrument.

At around 7:15, we had our nightly activity. Here’s how it went.
Day 1: Watched Soul(the movie)
Day 2: Staff Recital
Day 3: Watched Dumbo
Day 4: Dance(I just talked to Irene and hung out with the school group). Also, speedyfalcon had a water-drinking contest with Kevin Zheng. speedyfalcon won by drinking 10 cups of water, and proceeded to use the restroom 7 times in 8 hours at night.

After that was sleep time. I woke up at 5:58, 6:22, 5:10, and 6:01 respectively for the first four nights.

Day 5:
This was a pretty weird day, but we had our morning rehearsal(and I had my morning cup of Starbucks) and our final Musicianship class, where we watched musical cartoons and said things we could do to make our music better based off of these cartoons. After lunch, we moved our stuff to the Cone Ballroom, which was where the dance was held. We had a dress rehearsal there, watched the junior orchestra, and then packed up and cleaned out our dorm after that. I have a video of some kids on my floor doing so impromptu freestyle rap which was super funny. After the cleaning came dinner. Dinner was with my parents at the dining hall, and all of the lines had 5 billion people in it I swear. So, I strategically got food from the lines that always had nobody in them and had so pork, yogurt, and beans. From then on, we started prepping for our concert. We waited in Dail while the orchestra(which included hello_12 and Irene) played their concert. During that time, I played the Milly P Caroline in the hand slapping game(where you slap the other persons hand and vice versa until someone quits due to pain) and some other person in my band right after, winning both games. My hands were red af after the two games and I literally could not feel anything with my hands. The other flutes were anxious because I had a solo and they thought that it would be impossible to play flute with hands so red. Then came the concert.

Fireburst fanfare: Went great. Literally nobody came in early and it was great.
Brave Spirit: I did my solo and soli perfectly. There were a couple early entrances but it was super good overall.
Destined to Fly: AMAZING! I looked at the audience a little and a lot of them were quite moved by the piece as it’s a sadder and slower piece written for a student and a band director who both passed away.
Encanto: Went pretty well. Quite a few early entrances but we never fell apart. The flute soli in Two Oruguitas was stellar.
Byzantine: I ended up coming in a measure early in the last part, but quickly corrected myself. It was so scary, but overall, Byzantine went great!

Honestly, in the beginning, I felt like this band would be a hopeless case. There weren’t many people in State Band and I felt like the people would really struggle while playing somewhat simple things, meaning that all pieces would be easy. However, I was challenged by Encanto because of rhythms, and the rest were leaning more on the easy side but it wasn’t too easy. I really enjoyed the experience and I’ll never forget all the sunrise pictures I took(and the friends too, can’t forget the friends lol).


Edit: Oh yeah, hello_12 kept on doing weird stuff during my solo to try to get me to laugh(I won't go into detail bc it's somewhat nsfw and he also considered taking off his pants during my solo to get me to laugh?) but yeah