Any one had bad experiences at Uni

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Hello
now, I guess all people with a diagnosis of ASD have some understanding of why they have problems interacting with people, and I know for a fact that going off to study away from home at College or Uni can be the most testing for even the most sane person.


And I have heard stories from people who I know from where I live who do not suffer from ASD, anxiety or any mental health disorder who also had really bad experiences moving away.


So, perhaps not a massive surprise to hear when someone with ASD doesn't enjoy the educational experience.
For me, I went to college twice. First, I went to Art College, and secondly, to a famous performing art college, that apparently had a good reputation.


However my experiences at the latter were actually a great deal worse, and this was ironically because of their links with celebrities and the many slimey people who make up what we know as the entertainment industry.
Although as with politics, normal people only see what the celebrities want us to see, and like politics its an image and PR driven industry, however, if you were like me unfortunately to glimpse into the underbelly of their beast (and some of them fit that word only too well), normal regular folks would indeed be disgusted.

But anyway, I digress. Now I will try and keep this short.
I believe the reason why I got such a hard time was down to a number of factors.
Firstly I unknowingly suffered from ASD, dyslexia and hypogonadism.

Secondly, I was victimised while on the course by a guy who was into Satanism and black metal, who came from a wealthy privileged background. who did all he could to undermine all that I said, and I also believe started to cyberstalk me as well as steal my work while I was at uni.

To make matters worse, some of the tutors, decided to back the Satanist sociopath which I think likely because
he came from a wealthy background, but also because he was a sociopathic manipulator.
One tutor on the course I took (the course was on sound engineering) was a 5 foot 2 guy who was employed by the college after completing the course himself (and didn't have decent industry experience or expertise).

He also was a bully basically, but due to his wimpish size, he didn't use muscles to bully, but use manipulation, theft and slander. He also came from a wealthy background and was really a failed drummer.

To make matters even more bad, some of the local DJ's from the small island that I came from, who had a delusion that they were some kind of DJ mafia, decided that they didn't want me to become a successful music producer,
so used their music industry connections through DJing and event promoting to get in with the people who were running the college, to get them to victimise me.

Again, all the people involved. not one of them wanted to have an old school fisticuffs fight with me,
but instead, like a thief in the night had to do business like thiefs in the night do.
Behind closed doors, covertly, slander, stolen goods involved.

Of course you may have expected more from a world class performing art college that is associated with some of the biggest names in the world of entertainment including Paul McCartney.

But then, if you knew how some of these people rose to fame and now maintain their fame and power in the industry, you also would probably be disgusted and not revere such people as the Gods that many do.

Anyway, there is more to my story, but alas, I did complete the work that I needed to do in order to get my degree, but I only did the minimum, no more. As in short, the people who ran the college as well as many people on the course were complete douche bags.

I mean, the course I was on, it was required to work in one of 5 recording studios to complete own projects.
these 5 studios were shared by over 100 students.

Some of the a-hole students in my year, decided on the volatile strategy of trying to get other students to leave off the course so they could capitalise out of their studio time. And when I say leave, I really mean any way necessary.
They were complete douche bags basically. And the tutors didn't give a monkeys.

Nonetheless, I left, and then later on got diagnosed with ASD.

Something that the people at this college didn't put together however, is that their course only taught sound engineering. A trade that pays fairly low for long stressful hours for the majority, with perhaps only a few making it to superstar mix engineers who get paid £2-3k per track mix eng.

What they didn't see is that people like me are more than just sound engineers, but are musicians, producers, arrangers, midi programmers etc. so are multi talented, and thus have the potential to generate a great deal more money than just a low earning salary.

So, what these douche bags did to me, was even more disgusting. A bit like a world class actor having their career ruined by a tutor of make up art. An art that again is a fine skill, but never as important as the "talent" that they are working on/

Anyway, anyone else like to share any stories.
Thanks

I also happened to take a lot of courses in audio production and also musical performance, specifically classical guitar.

I was too apart from everyone to notice manipulative tactics. My guitar professor liked me and requested me personally as a student because I displayed natural talent in terms of technique. A lot of my college life was sitting in my room practicing (or feeling crushing anxiety about practicing and distracting myself). I was always barely hanging on, but my professor would praise my playing saying I had the capability to be legitimately a world class player. He had trained one before, Matt Palmer, so he knew what he was saying:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54txdiTofxs (ugh...life's not fair)

I still had immense issues. I would have problems with attendance and isolation. I would get burned out and start wearing the same clothes every day, failing to shower and groom, and become a "eyes to the ground" kind of person avoiding everyone. I still made it through, ultimately, but my performance overall was not optimum. It felt like I was grinding through painfully and coasting on my strong ability to regurgitate information on tests and cram.

I would go through cycles where I might make some friends early on in a semester and by the end of it I was completely isolated.

I ended up doing a certain kind of major where they let me split my upper divisions between music and history. I ended up taking a lot of upper division history courses because I loved the subject and found myself naturally talented at memorizing the information and critically analyzing it in my written work. I'm pretty sure I floored my professor on my Middle East course by explaining precisely what the purpose of the Pillars of Islam is sociologically.

It was all excruciating, but I had that drive to be a first gen graduate. I knew what it meant. More importantly, considering my background in rural poverty, I knew what not having it meant. I got that damnable piece of paper and I am very proud of it.

College was both the best and worst times of my life.

I had an amazing time as far as education is concerned. I went to a small liberal arts college which had tiny class sizes, so I got to know some of my professors very well and was even a TA during my final year. It was a great experience because, up until then, I homeschooled and was mostly self taught, so I never had had the opportunity to discuss literature and philosophy with other people to that extent before.

While I developed friendships with professors, I struggled socially with my peers. I was dreadfully shy, and I had to deal with a situation that involved serious abuse followed by hurtful bullying which led to a chaotic, downward spiral that I’ve never fully recovered from.

I had been so sheltered (and wasn’t yet aware that I had autism) that I had no clue about what to watch out for or how to navigate relationships.

I graduated with highest honors, but my life was set back more than it was pushed forward by the time I was done.

My experience in college contained some very highs and very lows. It was a time of extremes.

I wish that I could do it over again because there are some things that I would do differently, but one can only go forward or at least try to.

Last edited by TwilightPrincess on 12 Jun 2019, 11:09 pm, edited 2 times in total.

I moved away from home for Uni and had a difficult time socially. I did not know I was autistic, and because I had excellent grades in high school I was not given any accommodations. I was the victim of sexual abuse during my O Week activities but I didn't know how to self-advocate. I didn't tell my parents because I thought they would make me quit. My dorm mate thought I was a snob because I was so shy. (She told me this at the end of the year and it broke my heart). We never really bonded even though I considered her my best and only friend throughout that year.

I spent most of my time hiding in the libraries and feeling extremely lonely or alienated. I was desperately homesick but too stubborn to quit school because I liked the academics. During the time I was in Uni, there were no computers so I had to handwrite my notes from library books, handwrite papers and type them later on manual or electric typewriters. That was labour intensive and time consuming, so it kept me very busy and kept my mind off the homesickness.

I became obsessed with my studies and graduated at the top of my class. I also knew my professors and worked for them, but I had very little interaction with my peers. I can't say it was a great experience socially. I don't remember the names of more than perhaps five people, other than professors or faculty members in my department.

[Edit: Apologies for the long post. It was a rather cathartic experience writing it, so thankyou for raising the subject.]

I dropped out about two and half years into my course, by which point I was reduced to whatever sofas people could offer me to sleep on - for as long as they'd put up with my alcohol abuse and the incredible stench. Most of the nearby bars banned me at one point or another - not for anything violent, I'm glad to say, usually just for blatantly stealing people's drinks when I'd run out of money again. Waking up in a churchyard or in a wood miles from home with no idea where I was and no coat or shoes on was not an unusual occurrence.

I did make a few good friends, some of whom I'm even in touch with still, but I wouldn't turn the clock back for all the money in the world. When there are meet ups of old friends, and everyone start reminiscing about their late-teens and twenties, I just retreat straight into my shell - I have little to say that's fit for polite company about that period of my life; I wasn't in the kind of mental state that you get nostalgic about.

I had absolutely no idea what I was supposed to do socially, and had never been surrounded by so many people for so much of the day before. I could see people around me doing lots of things that they seemed to enjoy a great deal, and I wanted to enjoy it too; but I had no idea how, and just made a fool of myself constantly and had melt-downs and shut-downs instead. I thought alcohol might help - everyone seemed to treat it like magic socialising potion - but it didn't seem to work too well for me, so I tried drinking more of it, and when that didn't work, tried drinking even more; until I found that I couldn't stop any more - and the more I drank, the more I found myself doing it alone.

There's nothing much to say about my university course itself; I couldn't manage to attend enough of it to give you any idea what I might have missed. I couldn't see any future for myself, so there didn't seem like a lot of point. In truth, I'd only gone to university at all because it's what all the adults in my life thought a "clever boy" should do - and I didn't feel like a very "clever boy" when went out to try to make friends only to wake up in the middle of a field yet again.

How I never ended up arrested, put in a psychiatric ward, got my head kicked in by someone, or just succumbed to hypothermia under a bush somewhere I have no idea (I shan't dwell on some of the darker thoughts that I'd had). It would be nearly thirty years before I found out I was autistic. However, I already knew back then that there were parts of me which had to be hidden at all costs because people found them freakish - I started learning that in primary school. I assumed that I must be insane somehow, and not knowing what my melt-downs and shut-downs were, and having no memory of them, I lived in fear of what I might discover I had done - not helped by people becoming suspiciously quiet if I ever asked them what they'd seen.

The student medical service were hopeless; they just implied that I was a party-animal who was burning the candle at both ends and sent me home with something for my indigestion (how I wished at the time that I could be a party animal.)

Even though my auto-biographical memory is rather poor, looking back on it now that I've been diagnosed and learned so much about autism is a very strange experience. I can see very clearly that I was overwhelming myself by striving too hard to fit in, not knowing what other choice there might be; that my "teleportations" to the countryside were the way that I flee from melt-downs; that a lot of my "drunken black-outs" were shut-downs (a couple of people did notice the difference - when being hauled out of a pub, I was sometimes like a sack of spuds [drunk], and sometimes like a mannequin [shut-down].)

If it weren't for the handful of friends I spoke of earlier, I truly don't believe I'd have survived it, or I'd be living on the streets - once I'd got away from that environment for long enough to begin dealing with my drinking, they were still there for me. They are the silver lining of a very dark cloud.

Thank you for sharing all of that, Trog. I hope it was cathartic in good ways as you continue your journey to self-awareness. I can identity with a lot that you wrote, about following the herd into University, having little metacognitive insight, not wanting to reminisce about your education, and especially this:

"I already knew back then that there were parts of me which had to be hidden at all costs because people found them freakish - I started learning that in primary school. I assumed that I must be insane somehow, and not knowing what my melt-downs and shut-downs were, and having no memory of them, I lived in fear of what I might discover I had done - not helped by people becoming suspiciously quiet if I ever asked them what they'd seen".

That really hit home for me.

Congrats on your recovery, and thanks for being a friend.

Thankyou, Isabella. Making new "pen friends" like yourself who can validate such experiences and help me to fit them into context (and to play word games with, of course!) is a wonderful feeling. Just as with IRL socialising, the forums can exhaust me sometimes, but it would leave a hole in my life if they were taken away from me.

And yes, cathartic in good ways, I think. I've long harboured guilt that I've never been able to express my gratitude to those "silver lining" friends. My mumbling, bumbling, and fumbling has always interfered badly with my ability to communicate it. If there's ever a "right moment", it's long gone before I've finished procrastinating about whether it's a "right moment" or not, and in the mean time, my auto-pilot flips into "flippancy mode". It's this reflexive caution about opening up to these wonderful people which upsets me more than the dark memories, but they're of events that I know have reinforced that reflex. Getting them out of my head and into writing is a step in the right direction, I believe.

If I went to uni at the usual age, Im sure I would have had worse experiences than what happened to me when I went to uni in my 30s and 40s.

The worst issue I had at uni was when other students tried stole my homework and claimed it as their own. To bad for them ... what they stole were the rough drafts, which were full of errors in facts, grammar, punctuation, and spelling (This was during the time before word processors became readily available). While I had to start over from scratch, they turned in papers that earned them failing grades.

I guess it wasn't so bad for me after all...

When I graduated from high school, I was optimistic about my life for the first time. I thought I would have a future doing something related to the English language, either teaching or writing. My illusions about being something were nearly shattered the first week of college. Once again, I had people telling me I couldn't, for one reason or another, do something I really wanted to do. I did do quite of things related to the English language. I taught junior college English (mid-level composition) and reading, I was a proofreader at my local newspaper, did home editing work and have worked at the library for nearly 17 years. However, I never had a full time job.

University was a less than pleasant experience. While my grades were good, I didn't like the politics or the life philosophy I was being exposed to there. It was a nihilistic mindset, and made me depressed. I was glad to finally be out of there.

Nihilism tends to be a "conceit" practiced by people of high school and college age---without realizing, fully, that Nihilism means, in its purest form, the philosophy of "nothing."

I think it's important to distinct nihilism as a life philosophy and as a "reality adjective." As a life philosophy it basically just means de facto pessimism.

Have you ever gone through a literal, Nietzsche style existential crisis? It is the mature response to a realization (whether founded or not to be fair to those with different opinions) of a nihilistic reality, and it can be difficult to cope with. I would say most, but not all of course, teenagers or even college age adults aren't capable of understanding nihilism. They need to experience more life, have their "comfort delusions" shattered by reality, and witness the arbitrary nature of suffering and the apparent lack of justice in the world.

Picking up the pieces from that shattering and figuring out how to go along in life positively after those sorts of realizations is the interesting part.

A simple example is figuring out how to cope with the probable reality that there is no afterlife, at least one in which the consciousness of distinct individuals is preserved. Many people struggle terribly with this and can't handle the notion. If you have a different perspective than me, it is not my attempt to belittle your belief, just to provide my own view.

I went through an existential crisis when I was 11.

I knew, in order to be able to exist in the world, that I had to get out of that pure mindset----that I'm going to die eventually----even if that happens to be true.

I knew that I had to divert myself away from it in order to have a chance for a happy life.

Maybe my lack of desire to confront this has caused me not to be as profound a writer as I want to be.

It took me until the age of 26 or so to have this sort of crisis. I had become atheistic (at least as it relates to an Abrahamic system of metaphysics) fairly early on in my adolescence (which was a severe distinction in my cultural environment).

It took much later to grasp the ramifications of a cosmos without purpose or meaning as it relates to human society. It also took a lot of research on the specific nature of human perception and social relations. I had to mature and grow out of an adolescent mindset, where I did not truly understand the scope of what I believed about the nature of reality.

I relate to diverting away from it. There's a truth to that quote about staring into the abyss. I saw research recently showing that a religious or superstitious mindset had neurochemical implications and tended to make people be, for lack of a better description, more "well rounded" mentally. Perhaps the purpose of spirituality is to successfully delude oneself into coping with reality. (I can't quite find the research at the moment but if I do I will edit my comment). Once again, I do not mean to insult those who disagree. These are just my thoughts.

I sometimes think about practicing certain kinds of eastern life philosophies and meditation to acquire the same sort of effect. I can't undo what I have learned and the criticisms of a "just" universe, but perhaps I can come to terms with it through philosophies which require minimum metaphysical belief but still encourage a sense of meaning through being a part of the happening of the cosmos.

I think that the course work at Uni is just a nominal purpose. The real education is about how to deal with people whose talents are political, not substantive. That is taught indirectly, but constantly, without instruction. It also teaches the political ones how to take advantage of the talent, but almost nothing about how to recognize it. In the US, it also provides an opportunity for the bankers to obtain a slave legally.

I didn't have a very good time at university. At the time I assumed I was having a great time... hey! I was at university. Escaping from the parental home was a good thing (I never really went back). But looking with the benefit of hindsight the total aimlessness of my existence and the lack of structure was making me deeply unhappy and was proving stressful.
In my third year... just two weeks after my 21st birthday I had some sort of breakdown. I remember sitting in the library... I was reading Fitzgerald's "Last Tycoon" and it just felt like the ceiling fell in on me (metaphorically speaking). I never sought any help, but I spent a lot of the time sobbing (when I was on my own). Can't really remember how it all played out... but it took years to over it.