Sept 26, 2024
Episode Description
In this special back-to-school episode, we dive into the unique challenges that neurodivergent students face in college. Whether you’re currently in school, thinking about going back to school, or you’ve had a negative experience with school in the past that you’d like to reframe, this episode will have something for you. I’m joined by three students—Kayla, Ren, and Haley and together we’ll explore what it’s like to manage the academic and mental load, access accommodations (or face the gaps in support), and advocate for your needs. You’ll walk away with practical tips for studying and staying on track, all while taking care of your mental and emotional health.
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Important Links
Get the Dopamine Dollars budget template HERE.
Learn more about the Neuro$picy Money Method HERE.
Join the Neuro$picy Money Method waitlist HERE.
Check out Goblin Tools HERE.
Get 50% off your first year of Notability Plus HERE.
Apply for the Canadian grant for students with disabilities HERE.
Check out the Neads Scholarship HERE.
Resources
- Building Neurodiversity-Inclusive Postsecondary Campuses
- Why an ADHD diagnosis is often out of reach for Canadian university students
- How can we improve outcomes for college students with ADHD?
- How ADHD impacts college & university students
- Students with autism spectrum disorders and their first-year college experiences
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Transcript
Unless I find that subject novel, exciting, interesting, I don’t care about it.
I really enjoy the lifestyle that it brings. I mean, I’ll be sad when it’s over, but now I have to prove to you here I failed again.
Now can I have some help? The university experience is not built for neurodivergent people or people with disabilities.
It just isn’t. Hi, friends, and welcome back to dopamine dollars, the podcast where we dive into the emotions, science, and real life impact of managing your money and your life when you’re neurodivergent.
I’m your queer AuDHD, Ellyce Fulmore, and today we are talking about navigating college or other schooling as a neurodivergent student.
Whether you’re currently in school, thinking about going back to school, or you’ve just had a negative experience with school in the past that you’d like to reframe and move past, this episode will have something for you.
Okay, y’all, if you follow me on Instagram, then you already know this. But this is my second time filming this podcast because the first time, in an attempt to make the YouTube version of this podcast, which, by the way, if you didn’t know, season two of dopamine dollars is also available now to watch on YouTube.
But in an attempt to make it a better experience for people watching on YouTube and not have the mic covering my face as much, I decided to hold the mic.
I do have a mic cover, and I thought that would probably be good. I wouldn’t need this pop filter.
And I even tested it out. I said some things, I listened to it back. I was like, this sounds great. And then I record the whole episode, go to edit it, and I realize audio quality was not great.
There was too many audio issues for me to even feel good about putting the episode out.
So I just decided to re record it, which is why we are here. You know what? I’m going to be honest with you, because this is a Neurodivergent podcast, and I’m neurodivergent.
And I feel like you need to see the behind the scenes of what it’s like to be a business owner and have a podcast when you’re a neurodivergent.
I’m recording this on Wednesday and the podcast goes out on Thursday. That is how much I have put this off because I felt so good about the first round that I recorded, and the audio is so bad, and I was so frustrated by that.
And so I just didn’t want to do it again. But here we are. I’m doing it. Let’s move on.
Important piece of info before I get into the episode is that the waitlist for my signature group coaching program, the neurospicy money method is now open and if you didn’t know this is the only form of coaching that I do anymore, it’s because I love this program so much and I just have seen the impact that it has on people and I can’t stop doing it.
But I haven’t been able to run a cohort this year at all because of the book launch, so this is my first cohort of the year. I’m super excited. I’ll be putting out a lot more details on Instagram about what the program is like, as well as sending emails with more information to those of you on the wait list.
So if you are interested at all, definitely check out the link in the show notes. I will link the page to my website that just tells you more details about the neurospicy money method in general, and then I’ll also put the link to join the waitlist.
If you’re just like, yeah, just put me on the waitlist, I’m good. There’s a lot of accountability, it’s really fun and I would love to have you join us.
Going to college is challenging in general, but the neurodivergent folks face unique and additional struggles such as stigma and prejudice from professors and peers, academic difficulties, social isolation and loneliness, emotional difficulties, and increased mental health challenges.
These struggles can then lead to the development of unhealthy coping mechanisms, difficulty managing a typical course load, increased time needed to graduate, and ultimately result in dropping out before degree completion.
According to the CDC, one in 54 college students are diagnosed with autism. The World Health organization reported that more than one in every seven college students has adhd.
A study done in 2020 found that the population of college students with ADHD has increased from 2% to 11.6% over the last 20 years. The estimated prevalence of ADHD in college students worldwide is 16%.
The research also shows that neurodivergent students are less likely to complete their degree than neurotypical students.
Post secondary completion rates for autistic students is 39%, compared to the rate of 50% for students with all types of disabilities and 59% for neurotypical and non disabled students.
For those neurodivergent students who ultimately do go on to graduate, many cannot manag working part time.
In addition to their studies, the combination of doing more semesters and not being able to hold a job means that these students will likely graduate with more debt, and the challenges that come along with this additional debt are further exacerbated when, after graduation, neurodivergent folks will face additional barriers to landing and holding a well paying job.
I’m really excited for this episode. I think that this is a topic that is going to be so beneficial for so many people, and it’s something that really isn’t talked about enough. It’s important that there is more representation and that more neurodivergent folks are able to graduate and get through school if that is a goal that they have.
It’s also good timing for me because I am currently exploring the idea of going back to school and getting my master’s in something. So, yeah, I’m excited to do this episode.
In this episode, we will be discussing the challenges faced by neurodivergent students, whether you are diagnosed or undiagnosed during your school experience, the available accommodations, or lack thereof at post secondary institutions, and tips and tricks to help you thrive academically, socially, and emotionally.
I also had the privilege of interviewing three students for this episode. It is our very first interview episode. Woo. So I interviewed Kayla, Ren and Haley.
Kayla’s pronouns are she, her. She has a BA in global development studies, a law clerk diploma, a master’s in global politics, and is currently doing her PhD in political science.
Next we have Ren, whose pronouns are they, them, and they can completed an undergraduate degree, a postgraduate law degree, and are now fresh into their PhD.
Haley’s pronouns are they, she, and they completed an undergraduate degree and a law degree. So literally all three of these people have so much experience being a student, and you are going to learn so much from all of them.
You will be hearing Kayla, Ren, and Haley’s experiences, opinions, and tips throughout this episode.
So let’s get into it.
The college experience for neurodivergent students can be vastly different, but there are some clear reasons as to why post secondary in particular can be so challenging.
When you’re neurodivergent compared to high school, you’re dealing with usually a bigger campus and more students.
There’s just way more people there. It’s a brand new environment. You also might be moving away from home for the first time, which, honestly, is very stressful and a huge challenge in itself.
I also feel like in high school, you can kind of sneak by a little bit more. Like, you can cram for a test or maybe even not study and still do pretty good or still pass.
Okay, like, you can really sneak by on more of the bare minimum, whereas in college, you really have to put the work in in order to do well.
So that’s when we compare post secondary to high school. But just in general, on its own, post secondary also has a lot of challenges. I think one of the big things is that there isn’t necessarily a clear cut path or picture of what to expect and what your experience should be or would be.
Although there is, like some structure and some programs are definitely more structured, there’s a lot of flexibility in terms of, okay, these are some classes that you need to take, but you can choose when you take them.
And there’s actually, like five different professors that are teaching this class at different times that you can choose from.
And you can choose to do three classes a semester, or you can choose to do five classes a semester. And there’s just, like, so many decisions that you have to make and so many ways to do things, and I think that can be really difficult.
As a neurodivergent person, there’s not a clear path of, like, this is exactly what you need to do. It’s decision fatigue. There’s so many options.
I would also say that the workload, especially in college, is very ableist and neurotypical. Honestly, I feel like it’s not suited well for really anyone.
The college experience really promotes hustle culture and pulling all nighters and over caffeinating and just a lot of, like, unhealthy habits, basically, to do and get through this, like, huge workload that we’re given.
The experience of going to school also involves a lot of executive function, constantly having to manage different deadlines and plan out different things and organize different things and manage your time.
And there’s also a lot of transitions and task switching, constantly switching from different classes that use different parts of your brain that involve you to, like, dive into something else, and that can be really difficult.
Your experience with post secondary education can also differ greatly depending on what your program looks like, what kind of schooling you’re actually doing, and what level of education that you’re in.
In this episode, we’re going to be talking a lot, obviously, about some of the issues or hard things when you’re neurodivergent. But I also want to mention that there are positives as well, and there are neurodivergent students who are thriving and who do love what they do.
We’re now going to hear from Kayla and Ren, who are going to tell us about how they feel about school in general right now. I personally love it.
There are a lot of challenges that come with it. And there’s a lot of like, FoMo almost of like my friends that are working their careers and making money and going on vacations and things, things like that, because I don’t have the funds or the time to do that.
PhDs, I don’t know how much you know about them, and maybe it’s different in Alberta versus Ontario, but mine’s like funded. So I am given money to do research.
I am being paid to be a student. And I really love that because I get to spend my time reading, basically not always fun material, but I get to spend my time reading and writing and doing research and some of the time teaching because I am required to be a teaching assistant.
I really enjoy the lifestyle that it brings. I mean, I’ll be sad when that’s over. For a neurodivergent person, I think studying can be a bit of a double edged sword.
It’s really great to have structure and routine and to have really clear expectations in the form of, you know, semesters or trimesters and assignments with detailed criteria.
And to have this path that’s very, very clear. But at the same time, that can be so overwhelming and stressful and deadlines are a whole thing. And the university experience, for the most part, is not built for neurodivergent people or people with disabilities.
It just isn’t. And so I think for me personally, I’ve definitely felt both ways.
I feel like a lot of things that Kayla and Ren just shared with us are very similar to how I feel about school as well. I found school to be very challenging at the beginning because I was in general sciences, which, I’m sorry, everyone tells you to go into general science if you don’t know what you want to do, but general science is literally the worst.
If you like it, I’m happy for you. But it’s so brutal because the required classes are so boring. They’re also huge class sizes. You can’t really get personalized support.
And it wasn’t until I transferred into kinesiology, which is what I have my degree in, that I began to really, really enjoy school. If you have ADHD, you know, like, unless I find that subject novel, exciting, interesting, I don’t care about it.
So once I was able to switch into a degree program that I actually really enjoyed, I still found it challenging, I still struggled, but I ultimately enjoyed the experience of being a student.
I think one of the things that can affect your experience in post secondary is whether or not you were diagnosed throughout that experience. So some of the challenges you might face if you’re undiagnosed.
You might be struggling to complete your work and stay on top of schedules, struggling to pay attention in class, get things done on time, like manage all the different tests and assignments and quizzes from all your different classes.
Maybe you’re constantly submitting assignments in late or completing them so last minute that you’re, like, not doing it to the best of your ability and feeling.
Feeling really bad about that. You might have a lot of feelings of guilt and shame because you don’t understand why you can’t seem to keep on top of things like other people are.
And you are potentially adopting unhealthy coping mechanisms like over caffeination, pulling all nighters, frequently cramming, and even substance abuse in order to kind of cope with the challenges that come with post secondary.
College is also a place where because of these challenges, people begin to realize that maybe they’re struggling a little bit more than their peers, which could lead to them seeking some sort of diagnosis.
Haley actually had a couple experiences of, first off, realizing that they were struggling more than their peers in university, which kind of was like a ding, ding, ding.
Maybe something’s going on here, but then also had an experience with a professor who had suggested getting diagnosed.
So let’s hear from Haley about their experience.
Probably one of the biggest differences that I saw is that I had to do what, to me, felt like so much extra legwork in terms of re reviewing, getting outside extra help either in the form of tutors or extra office hours with professors, teachers, assistants, or even like, you know, going so far as to, like, buying supplemental information online in terms of, like, here’s all the, like, narrowed down information that your professor is teaching you and just like, bullet points and stuff like that.
And so I was spending so much extra time and so much extra money just trying to get the same understanding that it appeared that my peers had.
You know, I couldn’t go out to friends birthdays or couldn’t go out to two dollar Tuesdays at the bar because I was still trying to, like, get through a reading or finish a paper that I had left until the last minute.
Because, you know, nothing is quite as exhilarating as writing a ten page paper in two days. One of the things that was the most beneficial actually happened after my first semester of law school.
I got my grades back over winter semester, and my professor offered, you know, she’s like, hey, if anybody wants to come in next semester and talk about your exams and your grades, like, let’s do that.
And I went in, and she’s like, haley, what happened here? And I was like, I honestly don’t know.
I froze during the exam. And she was like, I know that you know this material. You’ve come to office hours, we’ve discussed this. You talk in class, you ask good questions.
I just don’t know what happened. And I was like, I don’t either. And she finally kind of goes, well, have you ever thought about having testing accommodations?
And I was like, no.
And I don’t really know what that means. And so she kind of explained it and suggested that I do ADHD testing to see if it was that, if it was anxiety, if it was something else.
And it turned out my first psych evaluation testing just, you know, anxiety and strict perfectionist parents. No sign of ADHD. So I actually wasn’t even diagnosed until after law school.
Kind of crazy that it took so long and so many people outside of my daily life to recognize that there was something going on underneath everything that was preventing me from showing up and, you know, working and processing properly.
However, it can be difficult to get diagnosed during university for a couple of reasons. One, I do think that is often written off. Neurodivergence is written off because instead, your challenges are attributed to stress.
And I don’t know why this is, but I just feel like so many healthcare professionals on campus are just being. Quite honestly, I don’t like using this word, but I feel like they’re being lazy with their diagnoses because they’re just like, oh, college students are stressed, so obviously it must be stressed without digging deeper into it.
For, like, five years, I was seeking answers to my symptoms of ADHD. I was told in university that it’s stress over and over and over again. After advocating for myself a lot, my doctor finally said, okay, maybe you have anxiety.
Still didn’t test me for it, and prescribed me anxiety medication, which did not help me at all. And then I withdrew cold turkey, which don’t ever do that.But I didn’t know that you weren’t supposed to do that.
And I had brain zaps for eight months. So that was my experience. And this happens to a lot of people. And there’s also this perception that college students are trying to get the diagnosis of having ADHD so that they can abuse stimulant medication.
But I don’t think that’s a reason to not still allow someone to go through the process of, like, getting a diagnosis. You know what I mean?
Like, still test them. And then if they are trying to do it for medication, then you’ll find out because they won’t actually have ADHD. Like, why are you just not even letting them go through the process right off the bat?
I think that’s just ridiculous.
Now, even if you were able to avoid all of that and have someone who’s going to take you seriously, getting a diagnosis can be very pricey, depending on how you get diagnosed. And the waitlist for getting a diagnosis from someone like a psychiatrist is usually months and very expensive.
If you do manage to get a diagnosis, that also presents additional challenges mid degree, because you are beginning to go through this process of coming to terms with your past mourning the way that your childhood or previous school experience could have been, you’re unmasking and you will likely experienced some skill regression as well.
Ren actually had some excellent advice in terms of this because they experienced this exact thing where they were diagnosed in the middle of doing school. So let’s hear what Ren has to say.
I did one and a half degrees not knowing what was wrong, and then I got the diagnosis and things became very clear. If you are in the middle of a degree and then you get diagnosed, there is like a process called unmasking that happens.
And you may want to take a break from study because it is a lot more intense than you think it is going to be.
There is this period maybe not for everyone, but for me and for a lot of people, I know this period of skill regression that can make studying quite hard. So if that’s a time in your life, if you’re getting a diagnosis, I would recommend taking a break from study if possible, whilst you’re going through that process to allow for your brain to.
To rewire itself a little bit and catch up, because it’s life changing. I just think that was such incredible advice because often I think the narrative, especially when you’re in, like, college, is power through.
It’s supposed to be hard.
It’s not supposed to be easy.
Like, it’s going to be worth it in the end, you know?
But the experience of getting diagnosed is just so much. It’s so much. It’ll be four years in December since my diagnosis, and I still have moments, probably weekly, where I am reminded of something, I have a memory of something, and I have a whole other period again, of morning.
You have this moment of, like, how different could that experience have been if I had had a diagnosis or if I had even just knew this about myself?
The advice to just take a step back, maybe take a semester off, even just to allow yourself to navigate those feelings, to also figure out what actually works for your brain and what accommodations would be helpful is also a really good thing to do, because as we’re about to talk about the process of getting approved for accommodations and getting the accommodations that you need can be very challenging.
And trying to do that mid degree right after you got diagnosed would just be a lot to juggle. Earlier, we heard about how Haley’s professor had actually suggested, maybe you have ADhd.
Maybe that would be something worth looking into, and how when they went to seek that diagnosis, they were told, it’s stress, and you have anxiety.
Essentially. You have anxiety, perfectionist tendencies. And that was kind of brushed off the table. And so I asked Haley in her interview, how do you grapple with the past, and, you know, how much you were struggling and how things could have been different.
Knowing what you know now, how do you grapple with that, and how do you move past that? If you hear me getting emotional,
I am, because I’m still. I’m a year and a half out of my diagnosis, so it’s still, I think, fresh in that mourning period. And even within recent years or even before I had an official diagnosis, there were so many times where I would be.
Especially came up in law school. I was like, oh, my God, if I knew or if a teacher, you know, kind of pushed back on my parents a little bit or if my parents weren’t so involved with, you know, outward appearances and how could they have an ADHD daughter and stuff like that?
Like, I could have gone to Harvard Law School, and so I’d have all of these stories that would kind of come up. It’s tough. I think, like, even still on, like, a day to day basis, it’s kind of coming to terms with where I was, how I got there, and where I am now.
Do I want to be in such a rigorous academic, professional space, or is it just something that I was just such a curious, intellectual child, and people just assumed that that’s where I would end up? And so now I’m trying to, like, fulfill their prophecies for myself and live up to their standards and expectations.
So I think a lot of it right now is, like, deep personal work, discovering if and how I want things to be in my life and figuring out if it’s something I’ve prescribed for myself or if others prescribed it for me.
And I’m still just trying to perform as the perfect go getter. 110% effort at all times, you know, somehow got me to where I am today. But you know, at what cost type of thing. And I think there’s always going to be some sort of mourning periods.
And what if, for me, a way that I kind of process and deal with it is just, like, really sitting with those feelings and what comes up. And so slowing down for me is definitely something that has helped with that and really just, like, evaluating who I’m doing things for these days.
I think sometimes, like, for me, I get angry, especially regarding other people. You know, I recall sometimes in university where I did need help, and I was asking professors and things like that, and these professors just, like, did not have 1oz of empathy when I’m coming to them during office hours, just giving me a little.
An ounce of empathy instead of treating me as if I wasn’t putting enough effort into the class. I think that would have gone so far.
Now, even if you’re currently in school or did complete a complete schooling with a diagnosis, there are still challenges that you have to face, like trying to navigate and access proper accommodations, maybe difficulty advocating for yourself, because even if you’re able to get those accommodations, you still might have to advocate for yourself with professors and other staff.
You might deal with stigma or misunderstanding from your professors and peers, and you’re ultimately still having to navigate a system that wasn’t designed for us. I’ve personally never experienced what it’s like to do post secondary education with a formal diagnosis, but Kayla and Ren do know what this is like, so let’s hear from them.
One of the biggest differences, I think, for me personally, pre diagnosis and post diagnosis was, like, feeling very validated in my concerns. So when I had a concern about needing an accommodation or needing extra time or different things like that, I knew there was a reason.
I wasn’t just making it up on my own. I was. There was a very valid reason. My brain works a different way. It needs the support. I was also less scared to ask for accommodations because I was like, here is this sheet of paper that says, you have to help me, whether you like it or not.
And it also made my relationships with my professors much more intimate because they knew who I was. Then I got to know them on a more personal level, which felt really good. And one of my professors actually shared his own experience about anxiety with me.
He opened up about that, and that was really nice to see because I was like, wow, okay, it’s not just me. And, okay, look, there is a future for me in academia because this person can do it. So can I.
And it was really nice to hear as well. Prior to my diagnosis, I say plural because I was diagnosed with ADHD and autism kind of separately. One came and then I got medicated, then the other came. The process of studying prior to my diagnosis was this cycle of procrastination, overwhelm, shame, guilt, stress, very intense, working into the night to get things finished at the last minute.
It and then, or coping, I should say using some less than ideal means and strategies and feeling better and then repeating that cycle. And that’s not a healthy or sustainable way to live, let alone to study when you’re meant to be giving your brain its best chance to succeed and to learn.
So leading up to the diagnosis, and then especially afterwards, there was a big shift in reassessing how I needed to structure the degree, which in my case was extending the degree, but also how I approached those deadlines and those assignments and those tasks and used different strategies or routines or people or apps or whatever it was.
One of the things that really stuck out to me with those experiences was kayla talking about how she basically had the validation post diagnosis, which again kind of ties into my point of like, I feel like professors could just have an ounce of sympathy and it would go such a long way.
I often felt like, I know I’m struggling with this thing, I know I probably could benefit from some sort accommodation, but I don’t have a reason for asking for it. And people are just going to think that I’m stupid, people are going to think I’m lazy, people are thinking I’m not trying hard.
Like I had these stories in my head of what people were going to think and so I didn’t feel confident enough asking. And I think that that’s a really powerful thing.
And I think that for me potentially going back to school, I definitely will have that confidence in my back pocket to be like, no, I need these things. And I think that that makes a huge difference.
Difference whether you have a formal diagnosis or not, when you’re neurodivergent, you are more prone to overwhelm, self esteem issues and burnout.
You would likely benefit from accommodations or support. So let’s talk about what those accommodations can look like and the barriers that exist to accessing them.
So first I made an appointment with my program register. I don’t know what it’s called. Ours is called Sihda. It’s like student accommodation services.
And I uploaded my paperwork so they had to see like my diagnosis and everything. There was different paperwork that’s considered acceptable for accommodations and then basically based on my diagnosis.
So at the time that I register. I was diagnosed with ADHD, so they have a list of, like, accommodations for people with ADHD. So they have a bunch of different recommendations.
And then we go through me and the advisor, and we talked about which ones would be suitable for me and which ones may not be more suitable for me or other things that I might need that they might not have thought of.
The pandemic has changed things because I did this pretty pandemic. But instead of handwriting, my tests, I was allowed to type them, which for me was game changer because my brain works a lot faster than my hand is able to write.
I’m still not able to keep up with my brain, but I was a lot closer at the pace of typing than I was at handwriting. One of the things that I never thought of, but I’ve recently been granted and I think is absolutely game changer, but I didn’t know.
I don’t have any tests or exams after 05:00 p.m. the reason they do this is because your medication wears down. Your medication starts to wear off by the end of the day.
And that was something I never thought of. But when they told me, I was like, oh, my God, I’m horrible in the evenings. Like, that’s a great accommodation for me.
One of the things I’ve realized with my accommodations is accommodations I had before were designed for graduate school. They were things like extensions and alternative text formats, because sometimes my scans were really poorly done, so I’d be able to get them reconverted.
But one of the things I realized is now I’m going to have sit down tests for the first time in a very, very long time. And I was like, okay, wait a second.
I don’t know that I can do that like a normal person. And so when I get my extra time on my tests, I get to write in a quiet, separate space from the other students and, like, different accommodations like that.
I’m going to give a little bit of a roundabout answer if this is okay. So I started my law degree at the start of 2020. Something happened which meant that I was then everyone was working from home, we were studying from home, so I was able to study in my own environment.
I was able to attend class without the stress of being in person amongst 20 to 30, 60 other people. Usually we would also have access to recorded lectures and we, you know, the material was just really accessible.
Our marking scales were all a bit different as well, and a bit more lenient because of what we were all going through. And I really don’t think I would have gone through the degree if it hadn’t been for that two or so years of being studying from lockdown down, because without realizing those were the accommodations that I needed in order to do the degree.
And so when that started to change and we started to go back to in person, I did not handle it very well at all. And that’s what kind of resulted in me getting the diagnosis because I kind of thought, why am I not coping as well as everyone else? What’s happening?
It just seems a billion times harder than it should be.
Something’s not right here.
I want those accommodations back. And so then I got the ADHD diagnosis and then I was able to apply for what they call an academic adjustment plan. So at least in Australia, the majority of universities have a disability system through which you can apply for an adjustment plan.
And so I got my academic adjustment plan done, which meant that I was able to not have mandatory attendance in class. So the days where I was having meltdowns or I had to leave class that I wouldn’t be marked down for that I was able to access lecture recordings so I could revisit things or do things at my own pace as well.
And I was also able to just use the academic adjustment plan when I was applying for extensions as well. For a prior to that, whenever I had an assignment coming up, I would usually have these huge meltdowns beforehand and have to go to a doctor every single time, which costs money to get them to write a request for an extension.
Every single assignment, every time. So having the adjustment plan pre existing meant that I could just use that and say, I’ve got these pre existing conditions, can I please have an extension?
So it just made everything so much smoother. And that was kind of. For the last year of my degree in law school, I was able to get time and a half in a private room, no more than 6 hours of testing a day.
My law school was, you know, very accommodating to my accommodations. I was able to have that, you know, completely and thoughtfully done, and it was so helpful.
So that was great. But what has been probably the most difficult in kind of the accommodation process is getting the accommodations approved and fulfilled as needed for licensing exams.
And to this day, I still haven’t had the full accommodations that I was recommended by this doctor who did my official first evaluation for any of my licensing exams. And they were like, no proof, sorry.
And I was like, really? Because I. I now have ADHD, apparently. So that’s a little different from the last time I requested some accommodations, but sure, okay, we’ll see what happens.
And at least in California, which is where I went to law school and took, have taken my licensing exams, it’s kind of a situation of like, prove to us you need it by failing, and then maybe we’ll give you what you ask for.
I’ve been, you know, quote unquote, failing for 30 years now, but now I have to, you know, show you again and prove to you here I failed again. Now can I have some help?
Which is just so backwards and like, it’s tough. It’s. It’s really tough. As you just heard, potential accommodations vary a lot depending on where you live and what school you are attending. For the most part, it seems like the process is pretty similar, even across the world because the three folks that I’m speaking to are in Canada, the US, and Australia.
So we got some diversified views there. But basically what we heard was this experience of needing some sort of formal diagnosis. You go into an office of the support group or disability group at your school.
You chat with someone to figure out, okay, what accommodations am I eligible for and what accommodations do I want and need? And then you kind of work together to put together this accommodation plan.
Some of the common accommodations that we heard about, and that may be a good place to start if you are looking for accommodations, is extra time on exams, having a separate room, a quiet room to take those exams, having note takers present in your lectures or classes to take notes for you and to send you those notes after class, and having flexible deadlines when it comes to assignments and papers and things like that.
There are also a number of scholarships, grants, and bursaries that you might be eligible for. In Canada, there’s actually a grant available for technology from the federal government where you can receive money to purchase electronics that will help you with your learning experience.
So things like a laptop, iPad, noise canceling headphones, you can get grant money to buy those things because they help make school more accessible. You may also be eligible for a disability grant that can give you money every semester to help with education costs.
And Kayla has some specific experience accessing similar things that I just named, but specifically through OSAP, which is like the Ontario. I don’t actually know what OSAP stands for.
Wait, let me google this Ontario student assistance program. So, first things first. With OSAP, you get declared as a student with a disability. So basically you just have to have your doctor sign off form, and through this, you are entitled to extra grant money.
First of all, that just comes. That’s automatic. If you declare yourself as a student with disability, you automatically get, I believe it’s 1400 per semester. But then there’s additional scholarships that you can apply for for funding.
So the laptop I’m actually using right now was fully paid for by an OSEP disability grant. Have the over the soundproof headphones, those were funded.
I was given $500 for that. There’s also different like technologies that you can use. So when we were still fully online, I had a transcribing service that transcribed all of the discussion in class so I could read it afterwards.
And then there’s also canadian. There’s the need scholarship neads. They are scholarships for students with disabilities. There’s so much different funding, but the key is, is most of them require that you’re registered with OSAP as a student with a disability.
So you must do that first. Autism, ADHD, all the different things. They all count as long as you like, get your doctor to sign off on it.
Despite the fact that the number of students diagnosed as neurodivergent has increased, many post secondary institutions still have an ableist, medicalized and deficit based view of disability.
Research shows that students access support services at alarmingly low rates. Less than 25% of students with adhd access disability services.
Now this is like shocking to me to hear this, because I know that so many neurodivergent students are struggling. And the research also shows that so many neurodivergent students are struggling.
Yet why is the percentage of students accessing these accommodations so low? The reasons for this are not completely clear and differ from school to school, but are likely because of a lack of accessibility for these services.
So even though these are services for students with disabilities, a lot of them tend to not be super accessible and have a lot of barriers so that can stop students from accessing those, and that the support isn’t meeting the demand and needs of students with disabilities.
So basically, that the services provided by the support service administrations are not actually the services that students with disabilities want and need a need. Some of the barriers that exist for accessing accommodation include the steps involved in actually applying for the accommodations.
Sometimes they are very challenging to navigate and involve a lot of paperwork. You also then might have to deal with administrative delays. It might take a while to actually get approved and be able to start using those accommodations.
You also may have to deal with explaining those accommodations to professors and deal with any potential pushback. You need a formal diagnosis to access accommodations, and this is a barrier in itself because of like, the cost associated with getting a formal diagnosis.
Also the like, accessibility to those kind of healthcare professionals and the stigma attached for different marginalized identities and just like so many other reasons. And I think that there really should be some form of accommodation for students who need it, even if they don’t have a formal diagnosis.
The students who are going to go out of their way to go to these like support services clearly need help. I don’t think that there’d be people abusing that service.
Here’s what Ren had to say about some of the barriers around accessing accommodations. It’s frustratingly flexible.
They don’t really give you upfront what you can apply for or the accommodations that they can do. They’re always a bit opaque in that sense, which is frustrating.
I like to plan. I need to know and understand these things and have time and space to think about these things beforehand as opposed to just suddenly being in the appointment and being presented with these options and just guessing at what would fit best.
But the coordinators themselves and the people that write your kind of your plan for you and go through what’s possible were helpful in filling those gaps. There was also kind of this weird, there’s this weird system in universities.
You’re just not told upfront what you can access and you have to rely on your peers and your colleagues firstly also neurodivergent or disabled, but then also willing to open enough to share that with you as a colleague.
Some people just are because it might not feel safe to then talk to them and understand what they’ve gotten to, then borrow from that experience. You know, I might be able to ask for this because this person got this.
That shouldn’t be the baseline that we’re working from. I think the university needs to do a bit more work to make those options more accessible in the first place so that we have time to think about what’s going to work best for us.
Not only is accessing these accommodations potentially very challenging, but there also is the potential that the students around you might have treat you differently because of these accommodations.
And this was an experience that Haley had, which was really actually shocking for me to hear, but they had this experience in law school after getting the accommodations for test taking.
And it’s maybe not the stigma that you were expecting. Let’s hear Haley’s story. What wasn’t helpful was like all the stigma that came with it, especially in a place like law school where you’re brought in on the first day and they tell you like, look to your right, look to year left.
One of them isn’t going to be here at graduation. It’s, you know, it’s cutthroat. But the stigma of accommodations and extra time was 100% there. There were people that didn’t want to study with people that had accommodations because it, you know, wasn’t fair.
That now not only do we get to have, like, this benefit of having extra time to take our exams, but, like, why would they want to help somebody on their outlines or help them understand the material if they don’t also get the same, you know, they don’t get anything in the return type of thing.
And so it was tough. But a lot of us with accommodations, we all kind of banded together and supported each other. I don’t know about all of you, but when I first was talking to Haley and she started saying that, like, they faced stigma and it was challenging and, like, you know, that kind of thing,
I thought it was going down the route of, like, there was stigma because other students were, like, thinking they were less smart and, like, looking down on the students that h accommodations, but hearing that they literally thought it was unfair that students with accommodations had an unfair advantage makes me want to scream because do you want to trade brains?
Let’s trade brains for a day, and then you tell me if you think it’s an advantage. I, that was wild to me. Overall, I feel like actually trying to access these accommodations requires you to constantly be advocating for yourself, which in itself is exhausting and challenging as a neurodivergent person.
So I want to talk about some tips for advocating for yourself. But first, let’s start with the definition of self advocacy, which is the ability to express your needs and ask for those needs to be met.
When it comes to advocating for yourself, there’s some important, key things that I would recommend. First off, I think it’s important to understand your needs in order to clearly communicate what accommodations you are seeking.
You need to understand what helps you. And also knowing why it helps you can be beneficial because you can use that to explain to, to others in order to help them understand.
Now, obviously, if you are newly diagnosed or have never been diagnosed and in school at the same time, then you may not know exactly what your needs are, and that’s okay, too. This is, you know, a learning process.
So I would say use the first year to kind of test out these accommodations. Be upfront with your support services, contact that. Like, I don’t know exactly what I need, so can I try out these different things and see what is the most beneficial and kind of experiment in your first year so that you can get a good idea, and then that will help you be more confident going into the rest of your schooling.
I would also say to communicate your needs in whatever way it feels best for you. If you know that you’ll be able to share your thoughts better via email, definitely, like, try that first and hopefully you can just do that.
If you do need to meet in person, you still feel like, uncomfortable doing that, then maybe see if you can have someone from your support services center come with you for those conversations.
When requesting these accommodations, try to use language like I need, I require, I would like, instead of things like I prefer or I think or I might. Because the thing is, you likely do need these accommodations in order to perform at your best in that class.
Just that language really communicates. Like, this isn’t a preference, this is a need. This i something that I do need access to, and you are kind of required to give this to me. I also recommend deciding ahead of time what you feel comfortable disclosing and know that, like, you do not need to share things.
If you have, like, the proof showing I’m eligible for these accommodations, you do not have to explain the ins and outs of your neurodivergence to a professor if you don’t want to.
And lastly, I would say understand your rights. Have an understanding of, like, what the rules and guidelines surrounding disability accommodations are for your specific school.
Knowing your rights can help you know when to basically escalate a situation. So knowing what rights are ahead of time and then also knowing who can you contact if you need to escalate a situation.
So if a professor is refusing to accommodate your needs after you’ve already had gone through this approval, you’ve worked with the disability support services, you have this list of accommodations, and they’re refusing to accommodate your needs.
Who can you reach out to for support? Who can you escalate this situation to? I mentioned at the beginning that I feel like the only reason I did so well in university myself was because I got lucky with a few things.
Number one, I only had to do those basic classes for a year before transferring into kinesiology, which I loved. I believe that that was a huge key to my success because I didn’t have to do classes that I wasn’t interested in for very long.
And the second thing, which is the biggest thing and truly, truly the defining factor in me doing well in school and making it through, is the group of friends I had. I cannot say thank you enough to that group of friends.
If any of you are listening. I love you. You literally got me through. This group of friends was amazing. We were all in the same degree program. We were all in kinesiology. So many of us were taking similar classes.
There was, like, six of us in this friend group with, like, a few other side characters that would get added in, you know, here and there. Basically, I’d almost always be in a class which, with at least one other person in that friend group.
And then we always studied together. And this was also a huge thing. We would stay at school late, like, till like, eight or nine at night studying together. And so not only are you getting, like, the body doubling of being in public, but you’re also getting the body doubling of being right around your friends.
And then we’re all studying similar things. That was so helpful because we’re all together, we’re keeping each other accountable, and then we would quiz each other all the time.
And so I also had this kind of external accountability of, like, knowing that this class I’m studying for is material I’m studying for. Potentially, my friend could quiz me on it tomorrow.
So that also kept me kind of more on top of things beyond having, you know, a friend, a study buddy, which I highly recommend. Probably one of my biggest tips for getting through school.
There’s also a ton of other tips and tricks for managing your workload and studying and completing assignments that can really help you navigate this process.
First off, let’s start with overall managing your workload. So how do you stay on top of, like, the endless amount of assignments, assignments, classes, tests, like, there’s just so much going on.
How do you stay on top of that? Big tip is to find some sort of project management system that you like. Whether that is like a physical pen and paper planner, whether that is an app like notability on your iPad, where you can have your digital planner, or an app like notion, Google Calendar, things like that, or combination of five of those, whatever you like.
But find some sort of project management tool or system that you enjoy and, like, because that is definitely a big key. You can also implement things like color coding for these project management tools. So you can do color coding for different classes or for different types of assignments.
So you could have, like, okay, this econ class is going to be all yellow in my calendar, and this stats class is going to be all blue. Or you could say all of my essays that I have to write are going to be orange. All of the tests that I have are going to be green. So you can use color coding in that way.
Kayla actually had a really good system where she only does three things a day. Here’s what that looks like my system is I assign three things to every day. They’re not all school things, but they’re typically school things. And I want to get all three tasks those done and then I’m done for the day.
So sometimes my days literally are done at like 10:00 a.m. and some days I’m literally done at like 08:00 p.m. like it really depends.
But I always assign three things to every day, and once those three things are done, I’m done, no matter what time it is. When it comes to actually, like, studying and completing assignments, I feel like there are so many tips, I’m going to kind of rapid fire some of them at you.
So some of the big ones, if you haven’t tried these already, are body doubling, time blocking. So like time blocking your schedule and using something like the Pomodoro technique, which is where you work for 25 minutes straight and then you take a five minute break.
Finding a study group or accountability group, breaking down bigger assignments into small tasks and scheduling those out, which you can use a tool like Goblin tools, which I’ve talked about before.
In order to do that, it will help you break down tasks into smaller things. So if you’re not sure how to break up an assignment, put it into goblin tools, which I’ll link in the show notes and it will help you break it down.
You also can use visual progress trackers, just like we talk about with money. You can do this with assignments, with classes, with whatever you want with a thesis.
If you’re doing that, gamify your assignments and studying. Reward yourself throughout that process. If you’re someone who gets very restless and fidgety while studying, then try studying while moving.
Something I used to do when I was feeling really antsy, like I couldn’t sit anymore, is I would go to the gym at school with cue cards and I would walk on the treadmill or ride on little stationery bike and go through my cue cards and quiz myself that way.
So that’s like a fun thing you could do. Another tip that many of you have, I guess the privilege of using now that I didn’t have when I was in school is using AI to help with summarizing things, brainstorming ideas, getting you unstuck when you’re in freeze mode, and just a lot of other things.
AI can be such a powerful tool, but I know that AI can also feel a little scary because we’ve seen some like recent news articles about, you know, students who have been accused of plagiarizing and things like that.
So here is what Ren had to say about using AI. Use it. But it’s a tool, it’s not a writer, it’s not something to replace your original thought, your creativity, your ideas. It is a tool.
It can help you summarize content, it can help you brainstorm ideas, it can provide you feedback on what you’ve written so you know how to improve your writing, but it should not under any circumstances be used for.
I think the generative side of AI is the most problematic in the terms of like generating content that someone can then try to pass off as their own.
But I think it has infinite amount of usage. As you know, I’ve got one that’s called supervisor which I’ve instructed it to act as if it’s one of my PhD supervisors, you know, and if I give it a section of my writing or I give it an idea, it’ll go, oh, you know, this has actually been covered, or this, you might need to expand on this a bit more and give me feedback in the style that my supervisor might.
And it really just helps me bounce ideas and develop things without the fear of staring at a blank page. I get perspective AI and perplexity AI confused. One of those two is kind of like chat DPT, but it will provide you with sources for what it’s saying.
So it will actually search the Internet, provide you with links to where it’s gotten the information from, which is super useful. And if you are using AI to research for school, for example, it’s impossible to use something like chat DBT for research because it hallucinates so frequently and will give you the most bogus sources, people who don’t exist.
It’s horrendous. It’s a language processor, so it’s a natural language processor. It does well with pre existing material. So if you give it something to then assess, it’s great at that.
But it’s not connected to the Internet, but things like Gemini, Bard, copilot that are connected to the Internet and can actually reference and source and so that you can go double check and fact check that one of the biggest tools for me was just giving in to the way that my brain works.
So I didn’t know I had ADHD at this time, didn’t have any awareness about it, but I did know that I was a procrastinator and that I would put things off until the last minute and that I would really struggle to just execute on the things that I need to execute on.
Basically, I would always be in this procrastination cycle. So, like, let’s say I had an essay due, it’d be due maybe in three weeks. And I’m like, okay, I should start now. I should start gathering research now.
And then, like, I’ll do the outline week one and I’ll do this week two, I’ll do this week three. I would sit down with the intention to do it, and there was always just, like, something more important or something more interesting, and it would get put off until I’m writing the essay the night before.
Well, I decided to basically surrender to the way that my brain wanted to work and specifically plan not to start things like an essay until, like, five days before it was due.
I wasn’t doing, like, the night before, so it was an improvement. But basically how I would schedule out my workload and how I would manage all my classes and things like that was that I would specifically plan what I was studying and what assignments I was working on based on the due dates and not based on necessarily how long something took me because I wouldn’t have that sense of urgency unless the deadline was close.
Urgency is one of the ways that our brain is motivated. That pressure, urgency. I really could put produce actually great work with a little bit of pressure. Give in to the way that your brain wants to do something, and try to find a way to work within that.
When it comes to managing your emotional and mental health, Kayla has a great tip for you. There’s like a few things I do, but a lot of them are stemmed from my privilege of having a paid, my degree paid for because I don’t have to work as much as an average student might.
But a few keys for me were my boundaries when it came to my time. So I give myself frequent, constant, whatever, whatever breaks I need, I give to myself. I refuse to do work on the weekends. I shut my laptop. I’ll answer emails if I have to. But I refuse to do schoolwork because I just want to give my brain that break because when it’s on, I crank it up all the way up.
But I’m very privileged in being able to have the weekends to myself. Not everyone gets that opportunity. Taking the breaks as you need them, as your body, like, tells you you need them, is one of the best ways for managing the workload.
But it’s hard to resist the guilt of, like, not working. And it’s taking me a long time. I still don’t think I’m fully there, but it’s taking me a long time to get used to that.
It’s made my productivity time, like the time that I am being productive a lot more useful time. I really love this piece of advice to give yourself at least like one day off a week from anything related to school and just give your brain a break and, you know, do something enjoyable, do something fun.
Or even if you want to do something, you know, quote unquote productive, you can do that too, but you’re just not doing school stuff. And I think that’s important. Important. I would also say it’s very important to practice self compassion as you go through this process because post secondary education was not designed for neurodivergent brains.
If you are struggling, if you are having a hard time, give yourself compassion, because this is hard for anyone. Honestly, I feel like the way post secondary is set up is so detrimental to everyone’s mental health, but especially if you’re neurodivergent.
So please know that it’s not you, it’s the system. Don’t be afraid to ease up on your classes, on your schedule, on school, on work, if your mental health is suffering. I know that’s not always possible, depending on your situation, but if you have the option of maybe doing an extra semester or doing an extra year.
I did five years for my degree. I did a victory lap, okay? Because I did one year of doing five classes both semesters, like a full course load and died. It was so hard. And I was also working part time. It was brutal.
From then on, I was like, I can only take four classes a semester, and then I also took a semester off in the middle of my degree. So I ended up doing a extra year and I’m so happy I did.
It was just so important for my mental health. Another thing that can help is seeking out neurodivergent communities, either online or in person. People that you can talk to, get support from, and that relate to your experiences.
On that note, also taking advantage of any free or low cost mental health support on campus. Also prioritizing sleep. Literally all of the studies show that you are better off going to bed early and not staying up for extra 3 hours to study.
You will do better on your exam the next day if you get more sleep rather than if you stay up and cram. Okay?
So go to sleep, prioritize your sleep, and if possible, find a way to move your body in any way because you’re often very sedentary during school and moving your body is just super good for endorphins and for your brain.
I wanted to end off on a positive note.
So I asked Kayla, Ren, and Haley if you could go back and give your younger, undiagnosed self some advice about navigating college. What would you say? Oh, my God. Other than that I need to get diagnosed.
I was just thinking about this the other day. My advice for myself would be like, go to class. Because that was something I really struggled with. And when I didn’t go to class, I wouldn’t, like, catch up on the material.
It’s not something I really realized until my graduate level classes, like how valuable it was attending class, even during zoom University, through the pandemic when I was finishing my undergrad online, turning on my camera was so exhausting.
But at the same point, like, it made me focus because I knew my teacher could see me. I think I just needed to be held accountable. I would say that it’s okay to quit.
I would say that it’s okay to not know what you want to do. That’s a part of being a young adult. I think there’s a lot of pressure to know when you’re 18, fresh out of high school.
I’m going to do this degree at this college. I think that is ridiculous. No 18 year old can know what they’re going to end up doing. It’s just.
Life is just not that linear. That’s not how it works. And I think the more time you spend trying different things, trying new things, and closing doors, the closer you get.
Get to the door you actually do want to go through and the thing you do want to work on. I think it’s just as valuable to figure out what you don’t want to do as it is to figure out what you do.
So I wish I had spent more time doing that and reflecting on a lot of my experiences, but especially with study and with the law degree in particular, I definitely fell victim to this kind of sunk cost fallacy where, you know, I got about halfway through and didn’t feel right with it, but thought, oh, I’ve gone this far.
I can’t not finish it. Even though I was in debt because I maxed out my student loans and it was killing me, I felt like I had to finish it. And possibly even still with the PhD, I may be feeling a lot of that external pressure to make something of it.
You know, it has to have been useful. And I just. I don’t know whose expectations I’m living up to. To my younger self, I would just say, drop them.
The main thing is that you are happy. And I think, don’t be afraid of quitting or changing or trying new things. That’s kind of the point of life, I would say, find the root problem. There’s a reason that it’s hard.
There’s a reason why it’s taking so much time and the time that you’re investing trying to understand this material is a lot better spent trying to understand why it’s taking so much more time and money and effort over.
I think a lot of times I just would kind of take, you know, the nose to the grindstone type of view on it, of, look, it’s. It’s hard for me. It’s always going to be hard. I just have to work harder, and maybe it’ll get easier, which clearly is not the case here.
I have decided that one of the things that I want to start doing and looking into is getting neurodivergent testing or some sort of evaluation in place in public schools in California or the United States, if that’s even possible, because I think that it’s so important if you can catch it early.
And also, it would be so monumental in, I think, fighting the stigma on it, because, like, you know, you get a couple kids when you first get glasses that tease you about being four eyes, but then they think it’s cool and they want glasses.
Like, imagine if we could catch these neurodivergents early on, enough that it’s like a tool and it’s a power that you now have that you can figure out how to manage and process the world and the information in the way that you actually need it. Oh, my gosh.
These answers just hit so hard. I am emotional listening to them. Honestly, I think there was a very common narrative and thread through all the responses of, like, whose expectations am I trying to live up to?
And also the process of dismantling the framework that we’ve been taught and the mask that we have. We all kind of grow up with this framework, this societal framework, and we build our lives and sense of self around this framework.
And then getting this neurodivergent diagnosis puts into question this framework and everything you knew, and you begin to realize how much you were masking and how maybe this framework was actually a mask for what you actually wanted to do with your life.
I think that is just incredibly powerful advice to think about and reflect on. Whose expectations am I trying to live up to when I take away this framework? I’ve been taught who truly am I and what do I want my life to look like it’s a big question, and I’m going to leave you on that dramatic note.
But I hope that this episode was helpful for you and that you either felt validated in your experience, or you’re walking away with some tips or pieces of advice to try implementing in your own situation.
Or maybe this is encouraging you to go back to school like me and see what school might be like with a diagnosis. All right, friends, that is it for this episode.
Thank you so much for listening to dopamine dollars. And remember, it’s okay if you need accommodations. It’s okay if you drop out of school. It’s okay if you change careers. It’s okay if you quit.
And you’re not less than anyone else, you’re just neurodivergent.
