I always knew I wanted to be a Nurse Practitioner (NP), even before starting nursing school, but I didn’t realize at the time one of the major benefits of being an NP: You’re not really considered a nurse anymore.

During my undergraduate clinicals, I started seeing the ugly underside of nursing, the side that students only hear about if they have nurses in their family: Nurses eat their young. At times it’s said almost jokingly, like a girl describing the awful band her boyfriend likes with a tone of, “I hate it, but that’s just the way it is, and I love him in spite of it.” As a student nurse, I would talk to any NP that would give me the time of day, and one of questions was about the interpersonal dynamics at the provider level: Are NPs catty to each other the way staff nurses can be? Everyone I spoke with said that the environment among providers was overwhelmingly better than being a floor nurse. So y’all can imagine how disheartened I was after spending the majority of my clinical hours this semester on a unit where the NPs are just as much a part of the Mean Girls culture as the nurses. One of the reasons I wanted to become a mid-level provider was to get above the fray, away from the backstabbing and snideness.

The real problem here isn’t my recent morale-crushing experience in the ICU, but rather the general Mean Girls culture in nursing, and the way little seems to be done to combat it. Channeling Regina and Gretchen might be okay in high school (if you haven’t seen the movie, go watch it now), but that kind of behavior is not only unacceptable for nurses, it’s dangerous. And it’s unfortunately all too common. When I typed in “bullying among” the first thing Google autofills to is “bullying among nurses.” That says a lot. There have even been articles written for the American Association for Critical-Care Nurses, American Nurses Association, and the Academy of Medical-Surgical Nurses about bullying in the nursing profession. New grad RNs tend to get targeted the most, and much like the Greek system, there is a strong tradition of hazing in nursing that ultimately puts the patient at risk.