Autistic folk in college, I need your input! Is it worth it?
I need college experiences stories from recent or current autistic college students for my scared-of-college autistic daughter, please!
(please reblog to share, I need some visibility for this to work)
My (unofficially diagnosed) autistic daughter has been homeschooled for her entire life. She graduates this spring. She is terrified of the idea of going to college. Currently she refuses to even consider it. She tried out public high school once for one week and found it excessively stressful. She begged to come home and was miserable there. She's intelligent, but not always quick. She also tends to denigrate her own intelligence because it's not in the same form as other people's intelligence.
She has friends who are in college, neurotypicals, and they seem very stressed and busy. It scares her, I believe, because she views them as more intelligent and scholarly competent than she is. When we talk about her going to college she freaks out and is convinced she couldn't handle the coursework or constant studying, papers, and deadlines. She reacts to the idea of college like I would react to the idea of finding out someone secretly signed me up to coach middle school boys football, in another state, while living next door to a drummer, and it started tomorrow.
College was amazing for me. I was free. I made my own choices. The coursework was sometimes stressful, but usually only if I had procrastinated.
She says my experiences aren't useful information because that was 20 years ago. She believes college is more work and more difficult now. I admit, I have no idea.
That's where you come in (hopefully). I think she'd have a wonderful time, but maybe I'm wrong. I have at least convinced her to hear first-hand stories about autistic folk in college. How stressful and difficult they find it, how supportive their schools are, and whether they found it worth the debt and time. Is college what you hoped it would be?
Please send me your experiences! I want her to have more information about what things are really like today. She says she has never seen anyone be positive about going to college on Tumblr, and she values tumblrfolk advice very highly.
About me: I'm a self-dx autistic. You can read previous posts of mine to know all about it if you care to. You probably don't. I've got a BA in psychology that's utterly useless for good jobs, but handy for understanding psych issues and deciphering DSM diagnoses. I don't know anyone in my close family and friends circle who doesn't concur with my diagnosis (other than my mom, but she was always a bad mom, I've ignored her for years). I've even made them go over DSM criteria with me, and two of them also have psych degrees. Yet here I am defending without being attacked to try to justify what I know about my own damn self. So... *sigh*.