wait you spent 7 years in college? would you be willing to talk about that? I'm very anxious about starting college as an older adult, esp because I kind of have to speedrun all the stuff you're supposed to pick up between ages 10-18 because of poorly addressed adhd and trauma (varied)
When I was a senior in high school I applied to and was accepted by a private liberal arts college in New York.
My parents were like “eeehhhhhhhhhh, we’re not going to cosign a loan for that” because they thought the school didn’t grant degrees??? For some reason??? So instead I started going to the community college my dad taught at. I started summer school before I actually graduated high school because I’d applied to and was accepted by the school’s study abroad program but I had to have at least 12 units done before the Spring Semester.
Then I had. Hm. Kind of a horrible mental breakdown? This was in around October and basically it was a major depressive episode that made it really difficult for me to do? Like? Anything? So my parents were like “we’re not really sure you’re stable enough for the study abroad trip, we’re not going to help you with that financially” and while I could afford regular community college classes I couldn’t afford the study abroad trip without help so I kind of got more depressed and ended up failing three of my classes. The only classes I *didn’t* fail were English Lit and Journalism Production, because that was the class that was for making the school paper and I was the Local section editor for the school paper.
So then I kept taking Journalism at the first school and started taking other classes at a community college that was closer to home. Then in March I got a job at a coffee shop for handling a dead body and in early April my boyfriend raped me and in late April I started dating this weird hacker guy I knew from the coffee shop.
I failed out of ALL of my classes at the second community college because I didn’t want to run into rapey boyfriend on campus. I’m actually still on academic probation at that school.
So that was June of 2004 to April of 2005.
I worked at the coffee shop through the summer and started classes at the first community college again in August and I was working on the school paper again and then I got fired from the coffee shop in October and started working at the gun shop in November and I was trying to take remedial algebra that semester but I got bullied by a bunch of the other students and the professor didn’t do anything about it so I quit going and failed and I think I also failed German that semester.
So then I got fired from the gun shop in January and got a job at a different coffee shop in february and at this point I was also kind of living with the weird hacker dude from the first coffee shop and still working on the school paper and I took like four online classes (human sexuality, HTML coding, introduction to the Internet, and remedial algebra) and I only failed HTML coding and the hacker helped me not-exactly-cheat my way through my remedial math class.
It’s pretty important to note that I didn’t really want to get a degree at that point. I was taking classes I was interested in and doing lots of Newspaper Production and it was pretty great - and then I applied for a job as a magazine layout editor because it was something I’m really good at and had been doing for a while. And one of the students in my class who had no page layout experience and no portfolio but DID have a BS in biology got the job.
So then I decided I wanted to actually get a degree so I had to do my GEs so I could transfer.
Then things went extra-super weirdly well for a while. The 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 school years were really great for me.
I’d decided I was going to be an English Lit major because it was easy for me so I got all the hard requirement classes out of the way at the community college. I took math for liberal arts majors; I failed ballet; I took German again twice and did way better; I took a cartooning class and a watercolor class and I kept working on the school publications until I actually started getting paid for being an editor. And through all of that I kept working at the coffee shop.
Things got a BIT weird in 2008-2009 because there was, like, Swine flu and elections and a financial crisis, but I also got a job doing page layouts and copy editing and ad creation for a newspaper in the same town as the coffee shop. So I kept doing all of that (school paper, real paper, coffee shop, 16 units, living with weird hacker) while applying to transfer to a 4-year school.
I actually had too many units to transfer with. You were supposed to transfer 90 in, you COULD transfer up to 160 in, you needed 180, to graduate, and I had 220 units; this actually worked really well in my favor because it let me pick and choose what classes to transfer so I was able to game the system and improve my GPA, which was kind of huge because I’d pretty much failed at least one class a semester since I started at the community college.
Then the hacker lost his job and had to move back in with his parents and on New Year’s Day 2010 the editor of the paper stopped calling me back and that’s how I found out I was fired and it was still really hard to get a job in the service industry at that point so I kept taking 16 units a quarter (because I transferred to a school that was on the quarter system and it was a godsend and I loved it) and collecting cans to pay for food and gas.
I probably would have had a much harder time that first couple of quarters except I had a great professor who basically let me test out of his 200 level lit class. In gratitude I spent my remaining five quarters in college taking every undergrad class he taught.
Eventually I was able to get a job at the second coffee shop again and my parents were willing to help me pay for classes at the “real school” now that I was “more stable” and then in December 2010 I broke my spine.
That made my two quarters in 2011 a lot more difficult. It also made it more difficult to work at the coffee shop and plan my wedding to the hacker, which was scheduled for a week after my spring quarter finals.
But I struggled through it, tried real hard, graduated cum laude, got married, got pneumonia, used my student insurance probably kind of the wrong way to get treated at the campus health center, and forgot to pay my graduation fee for (checks) Nine Years. So I don’t actually have a copy of my diploma and I think they’re gonna yell at me if I try to get a copy of my transcripts.
It took about five years after that to get diagnosed with ADHD, which in hindsight made everything a lot more clear.
It was weird, but so is everything. There were classes I liked and sometimes it was stressful to try to juggle classes and work and money and homework and relationships but here’s the deal: you can always fail a class and come back and try again later.
I mean, please don’t try this if you’re a returning student going to, like, USC or something. That shit will get expensive FAST.
But if you’re a returning student or an adult student and you’ve got the opportunity to take classes at a community college OH MY GOD DO THAT.
I wouldn’t have graduated if I’d tried to go the 4-year route right away, or at least if I’d tried to ONLY do the 4-year route.
Even when I was 23 at the community college I was VERY young for the student population and even when I was 25 at the 4-year there were tons of Real Adulty Adult students in all of my classes. There was an awesome dude named Steve who was in his mid sixties who was in three of my lit classes and ended up in a year-long poetry workshop with me.
So I guess if we want to talk about ADHD and varied trauma experiences my advice as someone who took 7 years and just a *ridiculous* number of failed classes to get a degree is this: Don’t freak out. Take your time. If you fail you can always try again, if you need help talk to your professors.
If I’m being totally honest I still kind of resent the fact that I felt like I had to get a degree - I basically don’t use my education to do my job and it felt like a huge amount of unnecessary hoop-jumping, but I’m glad I took the classes I enjoyed and learned to work with people I thought were assholes and got really, really good at doing research, planning out 3-5 months of work, and organizing my written thoughts.
It’s gonna be great and it’s gonna be shitty and I hope you really enjoy it. If you aren’t enjoying your education take a step back and examine why you’re doing it. If you feel like you need a degree in a particular field to get the job you want you *probably* don’t, outside of like, law and medicine and laboratory science. If you hate what you are studying try to see if there’s a way you can adjust course that doesn’t throw away your effort - maybe chemical engineering is out but you might like civil engineering; maybe sociology is out but you might like history. Try not to front-load your core classes too much and focus on doing GEs and figuring out how the college environment really works for you so that the learning curve is stuff that’s easy to do over if you have to.
I dunno. Have a good time. Be safe. Learn stuff. Don’t stress.
Also at one community college there was a girl who came to school every day in head to toe romantic goth clothes and had had fangs cemented to her teeth. At the four year school there was a girl who came to class every day in full lolita dresses with lace stockings and parasols and all of that.
You are not even CLOSE to the weirdest thing the other students are going to see every day, your professors are probably going to be a hell of a lot more patient with you than with the eighteen year olds (and the office hours are real! you can really stop by and ask for help! use that resource if you’re struggling!), and syllabi are cheat codes - you know everything that’s coming the first day of class so you’ve got time to prepare for it: USE YOUR SYLLABI.
Anyway, I love you. Good luck.
