In one short month I am going to be re-enrolled in college after two prior attempts and three years of trying to work out life stressors and hold a stable job. Spoiler: Background Classes are paid for. I'm taking Gen Psych, Intro Humanities so I can get grade forgiveness. I am also taking Intro Sociology to boost my GPA to help me qualify for financial aid next term. I have a solid 0.0 GPA after failing four classes when I dropped out. My grandparents paid for me to go back to school this spring, and I can't afford to screw up again. Classes are online because I work 35+ hours a week and can't commute to my college. Potential struggles I see myself running into: *ADHD/Sperg combob executive dysfunction tainting all *Complete lack of time management skills *I don't actually know how to study *External life stresses causing all of the potential curve balls Any tips / advice?
Good luck. I was consistently a mess throughout higher education, but I got a degree despite a lot of brainweird and have watched a lot of people get degrees through brainweird, and advice is as follows: Try to communicate with profs as much as possible. My experience was significantly more stressful than similar ones because I figured not having a proper diagnosis meant I couldn't really communicate with my profs about brainweird, but I saw a lot of people do just that and the more you talk to them about struggles or needing just one more day for something or how difficult something was for you, the more they want to forgive you for any slip-ups or days when you can't work. If you don't talk to them they can fall into a habit of assuming you're a lazy student, but any student who wants to do good work is not lazy, just struggling. Even chatting with them as people and making your face known to them helps them assume well of you. And profs these days, unless cranky and set in their ways, have a lot of experience helping brainweird students. In my last year of school I took a full year of freaking Ancient Greek Language courses for no good goddamn reason, religiously attending every class despite insomnia making that a f u c k e r and pushing myself through executive dysfunction to do as much prep work as I could mentally bear (and finished with the best grade in my class yes thank you you're too kind), and the student who did just as well as I did and got (*almost*) as good of a grade as I did was the woman with chronic migraines that showed up to maybe 25% of classes because she was having so much trouble with them. But she was clearly talking with our prof, constantly giving him updates, doing all the make up work she could, and so, since she was putting in the same amount of work as my only seemingly effortless ass, we had similar final grades. The prof ran the course differently for the two of us based on our perceived abilities, and since we both did damn well for our perceived ability to do, we were both rewarded. I doubt she knew that I was also just running the gauntlet every day to get good grades in that class and the second the period ended and I could go back to the dorm I would collapse and wait for insomnia to punish me, but there we both were. The life lesson in that really long anecdote is that college is suffering, but it's more manageable suffering if you're in open communication with your professor and other students and are at least a little honest about your struggles, and there is actually more than one way to get a good grade in your class. Your professor will probably open the course with poorly veiled threats that students who don't do every assignment perfectly on time and don't show up bright-eyed and neurotypical every damn day won't pass--those threats aren't meant for you. Those threats are meant for people who don't care about doing well, not for people who desperately care but are struggling to do well. They're meant to scare a lazy student only taking the class because they have to, not a student who wants to work but has a hard time doing so. Almost any professor will work with someone who likes their class and wants to do well in it. There will also be the occasional prof who doesn't care you're suffering and won't work with you. That's probably because they're set in their ways and either don't realize how much these problems impair well-meaning students or don't believe you because you seem put together, or other assumptions of bad faith. That sucks. Unfortunately, what worked for me was bending to the pressure and trying harder to look squeaky normal for those profs. And to not forget that the occasional low grade could be carried by high grades--I'm serious, every semester, I would purposefully pick the classes I had to/would focus the most on (whether because I really loved it or it was really important to the major or it was really hard or the professor was a fucker or all of the above) and a few I would mentally throw to the wayside. I would still try in the less important classes, but only as much as I needed to to get a decent grade, which would be leveled out by the important classes I did really well in. I seriously recommend that. When you actually make those judgements about what you should or shouldn't focus on, based on difficulty and how much it will help you in the future, post-college, it seems less like you have a thousand things to do and more like you have some things to really do and some less important things to hopefully do, if you have the time. You don't have to do everything. Convince yourself to drop small assignments if your time could be better used elsewhere and your grade can bear it. This doesn't have to be about proving you are a Good Capable Student (you already are if you're working hard and want to), it should be about building up your life for the future. Will the busy work you're doing help you in the future? Is it bogging you down mentally? Well, how much can you get away with not doing? The end goal is becoming an expert in your field, someone who knows your stuff, not someone who proved they knew their stuff in detail to every single professor who asked. I knew someone (she knows who the fuck she is) who passed a calculus course by, well, calculating how much of her homework she had to do based on her average test grade and doing that much of it, since the homework was weighed very lightly compared to test grades. She would then do 50% of the questions on every assignment if that was what she needed to do to maintain a desired grade. That is legitimate, smart, and a good way to pass a course, especially if a prof knows why you tend to do that. You're going to have to handle balancing which tasks are important and need to be done and which can be done later or even quietly forgotten all your life. My girlfriend is doing online college now and is, in fact, going to graduate from it this year. She calls her advisor and her professors constantly because she has ADD and exhaustion issues and can't always do things on time/at all. She does what she does because she has an end goal for the profession she wants, and keeping that in mind, she does whatever it takes to actually enter that profession some day, not necessarily what makes her look the best to a professor. She uses her energy to do what it takes to pass and uses the passion she has for the subject when she has the energy for it. And none of this is bad, in fact, none of this is unusual--from what I've seen, neurotypicals do a shit ton of this and ACTUALLY HAVE AN EASIER TIME DOING IT, since they parcel out what they want to do and don't want to do so easily and feel few compunctions about letting what they don't want to do slide, since they tend to have more energy to do what they want to do well. That's what makes professors wary of students that seem to not be doing work--they have reason to assume it's neurotypical 'only doing what I care about well,' not suffering spergy 'trying to do it all well because I want to be a good student but not being able to, overloading, and crashing down.' Your reasons matter. That was a lot of text, but I really do have a lot of experience in 'people plagued by brainweird who finished college and finished it successful with a high GPA.' These are the sort of thing I've noticed in common across said people--knowledge of what they're actually working for, willingness to prioritize importance and deem some things unimportant, and enough tenacity to take looking bad and passing, even barely passing, some of their classes. And as much communication about why things are taking so long as possible. I finished my degree with an absurdly high GPA, but that was all I did with my time. A lot of the people who took worse GPAs but also worked or did something else to boost resume are doing just as well if not better. But the best thing is that we're all doing. We're all still around getting shit done and going forward with our lives. None of us ruined our chances with our different college choices unless we literally died. Life goes on, whether you made the best possible choices and were a perfect student or worked three jobs or found your significant other or no matter WHAT you did. Also, the phrase 'solid 0.0 GPA' parsed as 'solid -oh dear- GPA' to me because I saw it as a shocked emoji, not a number. Use that information how you will.
I so rarely use the o.o face with zeros that it flew past me how that could be seen! Hahaha I sincerely thank you for taking the time to respond so thoroughly. It actually was very calming and reassuring. The only anxiety I'm having about communicating to instructors is that the college has a Students with Disabilities system and if I don't have paperwork to submit I don't feel like I'll be taken seriously, or that they'll think I'm lying about my need. Then again, like you said, instructors are people too. Closer towards the start of the classes I might try drafting an email to them to see if they're willing to work with me.
If you can get the paperwork in, that's definitely something worth putting spoons toward. I had professors that would work with me, but once I got my paperwork in, it was much easier for them, and possible for the ones that couldn't. I needed someone to sign off on a depression diagnosis for me (which was easy because I was already seeing someone), but I had basically until the end of the semester to get it in if I didn't already have it, but my accommodations went into effect right away. That's just how it worked at my school, but I think it's worth looking into, if you can. I wanna second the "be prepared to let some things slide" sentiment. I felt like I was slacking off if I didn't do every single thing, but depending on the course I could get by with a B or C and just not do an entire assignment because I had three other assignments due that week. Also be willing to let yourself get by with less than perfect assignments. Something is better than nothing, and more than likely what you feel like it's going to get a bad grade will actually net you a decent grade if you just turn it in as is. I had to do this a lot with paper writing xP Prioritize food and sleep. Taking an all nighter or two won't kill you, but doing it every week might. It's worth it, imo, to get a 50 on an assignment and a full night's sleep. This is all based on my experience, which was that I pretty much had to learn to aim lower and to let myself off the hook for some things. I ended getting almost what I wanted in the first place, but doing it this way just took some of the stress off. Also seconding communication.
Oh, yeah. I never pulled an allnighter, not once. I struggled to sleep every night because of my insomnia and the bullshit pissing contest about who can be the most performative about their difficult, stressful life and brag about how little they've slept the most was not going to convince me to make my life harder. The college glorification of treating your body poorly is shit. Sleep as regularly as you can, feed yourself actual food, don't believe that the student who deprives themself the most is the best student. It's obviously not true. You need all the energy you can get. If the choice is between one last bit of thr project you haven't been able to force yourself to do for five hours and sleep, sleeeeeeep.
