University slowly killing me

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Hey every one, I've been gone for about a year and just got back on here. I came back because I am in university and with the stress I am seeing a lot of the symptoms getting worse. Has an one else found that things get worse with stress? I was wondering if any one had tips for some of the stuff I am struggling with. The first is that time is killing me. I know that my first class is at 10:00 and I know it takes me ten minutes to get there but every day I am late. When I am researching a hobby or watching a season of a TV show(another interest) I feel stuck, wait till the last possible minute and then run only to miss the bus. I also have lost weight because I am running so late I forget to eat. When I do have time to cook I lose my time in the computer and then it is 10:00 PM and all I have eaten is a Bagel and ten Oreos because there easy to grab. The same thing is happening for Hygiene, I am ashamed to say I am averaging a shower once every 3-5 days. This is not normal for me. I would not be to worried but it is affecting my school work. In statistics I can pick up the ideas easily but I am only there less then a third of the time and on my last assignment I got 100% on one half and 63% on the other because I ran out of time. I have been snooping for the last week but finally post again because of the 63 %.

PS. Sorry to you spelling and Grammar Nazis out there, Your really going to hate me when I post

Yes, college was a really good way to cause me to crash and burn every time I tried it. I eventually just stopped trying it because it obviously doesn't work for me.

I am 0 for 2 with college. This was before I was diagnosed so I would be interested to see how I would perform now. It was too much for me and I shut down both times. My grades were fine, but I just couldn't go to class anymore.

0 for 4 for me.

First two times, I just got very exhausted trying to keep up and dropped out.
Third time the school closed, although I'd somehow kept it up longer than the two previous attempts.
Fourth time I got exhausted, had a series of panic attacks, ended up dropping out entirely, moving to live somewhere else, and just in general turning my life upside down. This was during the period I was actually burning out.

For some reason I keep thinking I'd like to go back, but I don't think that's a wise plan.

I am thinking about going back as well. I'm considering a different route and possibly going for a 2 year degree in something related to a special interest instead of something mainstream and "respectable". I like the fact that a LOT of courses are completely online now.

I repeated my first year 3 times at University. Actually 2 different Universities, but that hardly matters.

Everything about it was so unsuited to my way of learning. In the end I had to give up on the whole idea, which obviously had taken a while to come to terms with. After all, all my peers went to Uni and I had never considered any other future.

All this was over 20 years ago, long before I knew anything about Aspergers or what might be wrong with me. My repeated failure made me depressed and I lost my confidence for a long while after.

All I'd advise is not to waste as much time as I did. There are better ways, such as learning skills whilst in employment.

You do not have to worry about the Grammar Nazis here. There was a revolt and the Nazi's where disarmed. Now they just sit in front of their computer prison and talk about the glory days of better grammar. Once in a while one breaks out and starts sniping but he/she is quickly muted? <-- See what I mean

I can relate to what you are saying about stress and college. You pretty much described my college experience. It also describes my life right now being the owner of my own business (why did I decide to do that???????) in a way. I'll give you some quick tips that help out.

1.) Have set periods when you are going to do something regardless of what is going to happen. Go to bed by this time, eat at this time, catch the bus at this time, attend class at this time, wake up at this time etc....

2.) Set realistic goals for getting the assignments done. Like before you start the statistics assignment, decide that will take say three hours and you have two days to do it so you will commit to working a hour and half each day to finish it. You also have to be flexible here, because some of those assignment can be harder than they look.

3.) Set aside some time each day when you are going to do that you really like, regardless of how everything else is going.

4.) Before you go to bed, make a schedule for the next day of what you wrote down for 1 - 3. Make adjustments as necessary and be flexible again. You do not have to be rigid and plan every minute, just a rough idea of how the day will go.

5.) Learn to multitask. Like if you get to to the bus stop and the bus has not arrived then break out a book and study the material. Might as well use that time for something useful.

6.) TALK TO YOUR TEACHERS AND PROFESSORS. Something I wish I did more of when I was in college. Explain your condition and be genuine about it. Don't wait until the last minute to talk them. When you feel things slipping away, that is when you should talk to them. Let me tell you, they have heard it all before, so that lame excuse you come up with the night before the project is due is not going to convince them.

7.) Take a day at a time. Just because you have to get up in front of the class tomorrow and give a speech doesn't mean you should stress about it today. If you followed your plan then the speech will go fine despite what you think.

8.) Do not worry about things you cannot control.

9.) Stick to whatever plan you come up with.

10.) You can graduate from college and still have time for your "interests".

11.) Stop by WP once in a while to unload We don't mind you unloading. Just ignore those Grammar Nazi's grumbling from their prison

With #4 it lowers the stress because you have a plan to deal with the day. With #7 you are not adding to your stress by thinking about what is better left for tomorrow.

Biggest thing of all. Have faith that you can do what needs to be done and still have fun. Biggest problem we have is ourselves. If you backslide and decide to be on the computer instead of doing an assignment then don't ridicule yourself for doing it. First off decide what you are going to do know to get the assignment done. If you cannot get the assignment done then calmly take responsibility for it. Then decide what you are going to do in the future to prevent it from happening.

Some people are simply not suited for college.

ruveyn

I'll take the bait. Why are they not suited for college?

Some people find that college clashes with their impairments, which is the point of disability services. With accommodations they may be able to function well enough to get a degree.

I am downright against just saying "some people are simply not suited for college." I am willing to say that sometimes college doesn't make enough of an effort to bring them in.

What kind of effort would make it enough to say college does bring them in?

Accessibility and accommodations.

It's possible that some people may not be able to be accommodated, so I don't want to make that an absolute. But I think for a lot of people, the barriers to college are arbitrary and pointless, and could be removed with only some effort, which ultimately would potentially bring in more students.

I think I have trouble with the suggestion that college isn't for some people. I think that determination really should be up to the people who decide it's not for them.

I got bored and annoyed with it. I realized by mid-way through my junior year I could teach myself anything I wanted to learn and didn't want the uncomfortable social interaction. By then, too, I had more real world experience in theater than I would ever have had going a full four years with theater as a major, so it seemed pointless.

I agree with what you said. But at the same time I would like to point out that its also up to the person to overcome the barrier (physical or mental). The college cannot tailor itself for you. You have to go the rest of the way.

The OP could have said "College is not for me because I cannot focus on it". But the fact that he seem to want to work on the problem instead of giving up is why I suggested what I did. Now its up to him to decide if that is right for him, some other way is better or just give up



I agree with this statement and would reflect my viewpoint. Especially now that I have worked with computers for ten years and have no formal training in them. I like the challenge of learning something new on my own. Seems to stick better when I have to figure it out than when someone lectures me about it.

So yes maybe college is not suited for everyone. But sometimes it works to open the door for other possibilities.

I think college really isn't for me. But I know people like me who have managed to struggle through college with a lot of time and effort and crashing and stuff. So I totally agree about never writing off an entire type of person.

One reason that I don't want to go to college, besides the fact that it mashes my brain into pieces and then spits it out again, is because of what it does to people's thinking. It's very hard to avoid having college subtly skew your thinking so that it goes down certain paths, and does not go down other paths.

That's one reason I think it's no accident that I have in my own independent research picked up things about Kanner's original writings that many people with advanced degrees in the autism field didn't. It's not that I'm smarter than them. it's that they have been systematically taught to think a certain way about what they read. I had no such conditioning, so I saw things there that many of them could not. I was flattered when one autism researcher said that what I wrote about it resembled a grade-A answer on a doctoral prelim exam (I actually don't know what a "prelim exam" is but I get the gist that it's some kind of test given to grad students), but I'm not sure many such students would have noticed some of the things I noticed, because of the conditioning to see Kanner's subjects in a weird combination of the way Kanner saw them, and the way much later "experts" have seen them.

I don't think it's impossible for people who've been through professional/college training to see such things, but I think it is much harder. Because there is so much that they're taught is "how reality is", and it's really impossible to go through college questioning everything you're taught no matter how explicitly or implicitly. So at some point you just start accepting parts of what's been said, and that's how they manage to corral your mind into a certain kind of thinking. (I think this is true of formal education in general, not just college, but college is really good at it.)

I think I am somewhat fortunate in that regard. Because my brain seems to simply upchuck a lot of that information rather than digesting it and letting it get into my body. So while I don't actually retain just about anything I was taught in school (sometimes a "bad" thing), it also means I don't retain much of the brain-corralling effect (sometimes a "good" thing).

The trouble retaining thing causes a lot of trouble for college in the area of prerequisites. Sometimes I could retain something for long enough to move "up" the line of classes from one to the other. But soon, I would lose all of it, and if I went again and wanted to take an "advanced" class that I'd technically be "qualified" for, there is no way on earth that I'd be able to do it. I'd have to go from the beginning all over again. And that's not worth my time or money.

There's other things I don't like about college... the elitism, for one. The way you're taught that if you've been to college, then you have special skills that other people don't. When college is far from the only place you can learn things. But tell that to an employer. (OTOH, my dad had only a 2-year degree as an electronics technician and by the end of his career he was better at electronics engineering than many people who'd spent a long time in grad school. Because all that time, he lived and breathed electronics both at work and at home building radio equipment and stuff. He's autistic btw. But by the end, employers actually recognized his expertise and gave him jobs appropriate to it, even though he had no degree in "engineering" and had spent most of his career with the job title of technician only.)

I know a woman who has really seriously bought into this and it's causing her all kinds of grief in the current economy. She's taking her lack of employment personally because she believes what she was told about being special and having special skills so surely someone would employ her even if they're not employing practically anyone, right!?! And on the one hand I feel bad for her because she's in agony over this, and on the other hand I sometimes want to shake her and tell her that having a degree doesn't make her better or more deserving of a job than everyone else.

Ideally, the education system would be a system of people and places where you had resources in terms of people, books, and various media, that could teach you anything on any subject you needed. This would be open to everyone, and would be constructed in as accessible a way both physically and cognitively as possible. It wouldn't be set up in a way where you would have to be there a certain amount of time, or take "classes", or anything else like that, if you didn't want to. I envision it as a lot like the public library system, only expanded and enriched in a whole lot of ways, and involving far more than books. And it would be about learning for everyone, not about.. all the other additional crap it's about today. And it would really be learning, and not in a brain-corralling sort of way. (I've spent a long time discussing this with other people who don't like these aspects of the education system. Some of this I could not have come up with on my own. So I want to give them credit, if only anonymous credit, for some of these ideas.)

But fat chance in this current society.

Anyway, yeah. I'm not suited to college, or college isn't suited to me, or something, but I would never make that chocie for anyone else. And it's not suited to me not just because of my cognitive and physical issues (that genuinely make the current system utterly inaccessible to me in so many ways it's really impossible for the current disability service places to make it possible for me... because they're about "accommodations", not about making the entire structure of the place accessible to everyone). It's also because I don't want to learn these things at the price of potential brain-corralling. And because I don't like a lot of the weird elitist stuff and other baggage that comes with it at the moment. (IQ cutoffs, anyone? GAAAAAAH. Just BAD.)

My best college experience, by the way, was at a small community college that had the best disability services in the state. People with cognitive impairments could literally take one class over and over until they got it. It was still college, and thus still pretty inaccessible to me, but it was the most accessible of any college experience I've ever had. I still crashed and burned afterwards though and had to drop classes and stuff. And it still had brain-corralling stuff. And lots of flaws. But it was better than my experience at a 4-year liberal arts college (which had some high school content since it was for high school age students... still drove me to attempt suicide though, it was too much too soon) or at a university where I literally never made it to class more than twice and nearly ended up homeless and had to leave after a month or two in a state of total brain-mush crash-and-burn collapse the like of which I never want to even think about again.

I have no problems with school. Work on the other hand is. Doing repetitive tasks for hours on end daily for the rest of my life is not how things are going to go down.