Aspies For Freedom

Go to college. Definitely go to college. There are way more options available for people with college degrees; and learning is often an Aspie's strong point. College is also more specialized, so you can go to the area you like most and ignore the stuff you don't like.

If you are not sure you can handle the change, I suggest starting out as a part-time correspondence student, then working up to either part-time in-class or full-time correspondence. Eventually you should be used to it enough so you can be a normal student. Should take about a year, I think.

Yes indeed. Don't just pick the first college you can be accepted at, just to have made a choice.

It can be, providing you don't get false hopes of automatically getting a job because of having a degree.

What is E2E? I don't understand what that means.

Well, if you don't want college, there are other options: Trade school, apprenticeships, associate's degrees (2-year college)... Don't just stop at the high school level, though. Even if you hated learning, the jobs you can get with nothing but high school education (and below-average social skills, which is what gets a lot of high-school-only people ahead) are for the most part boring, dead-end sorts of jobs you really don't want to spend your life doing. Most people who do those sorts of jobs are able to tolerate them because they socialize with co-workers while they do them... that's just stressful, for an Aspie.

I was almost expelled from college for no particular reason but some vague eccentricity that the administration thought was bad for the image of the college. I already had a history of being expelled from grade school a long time ago. I have been kicked out of two graduate schools, gradually accumulating university credits. But even when it did not always work, sometimes it did and I continued taking a graduate course here and there over the years. I am in a university that is keeping me and I expect to finish a PhD next academic year. That is very hard work and I could not do it while living on a campus where there is too much noise.
     In choosing colleges, stay away from the ones that have poor graduation rates, especially the ones that decide ahead of time how many in a class they plan to fail. The warning signs of such a school are excessive preoccupation with jockocracy with massive corporate sponsorship; e.g. football, and involvement with the more vicious corporations such as the tobacco industry, Nestles, or Cokecola, and have they been in the press for animal cruelty, Ohio State pays street people to pick up cats from neighborhoods and deliver them to the Ohio State biology department where they infect them with FIV so they can compare which street drugs accelerate their deaths. This is a reflection on how they treat their students.
     Tri a few courses and be a tough customer with a college you think measures up in its ethical standards and you will probably find a good school for you.

When you increase your education, you make the world better not just for yourself, but for those around you. It is noticable that the trashiest elements of society tend to be the least educated in most cases. Education makes us all better people.

I went the Tertiary Education immediately following Senior Secondary route myself - In an area that I thought would work well for me at the time.

It didn't, I couldn't manage my work load for assignments and there were focuses in the course that just didn't work for me. I went and got a job after that - which also didn't work out 100% for various reasons.

I was, however, able to complete a trade level Certificate in Electronics as a part time night course. I also completed a Certificate in AutoCAD through the same Technical College with some quite high assessment levels - also a part time night course. (I did this in slow time over a number of years)

AutoCAD lead to me becoming very interested in 3D, which lead to me completing a Certificate IV (advanced level) in 3D Animation for Film and Games last year. This was a 1year, full time, course. There were several things about this course that worked out for me, but one of the most significant one was there weren't different teachers/lecturers for different units of the course and I was always with the same group of students.
Another, was that the Course Provider - A third party Academy with close ties to our local Technical College - structures the courses to be as much like a workplace as possible. By this, I mean you don't attend lectures at specific times on specific days with sometimes huge gaps in between. Instead, you attend for 2 full days 9am to 5pm and one half day (either morning or afternoon depending if you're the first or second half of the week). Rather then your day being broken up into 'units of material' with lectures and tutorials, you work on a defined project for a number of weeks and are assessed progressively (by the teacher and your peers) at various stages of the project and again at the end. Each project is tailored to cover specific elements of competency related to the various units the course is broken into.

This year I started the Diploma of Animation: Screen, run by the same provider. I'll admit there are parts that I dislike or that I'm not as good at as the other students (you get that with everything). I am however engrossed in the course and have had favourable assessments thus far. I'm working at a computer all day (something I enjoy), the environment works for me, I'm enjoying the subject matter and presentation there of and the students are from a broad range and are all good at being constructive with their 'crit' when asked for it.

I'm not entirely sure where I'm going to end up (I rarely am when I study) but I've been told by the staff that I have numerous skills that industry will me looking for - even if I do work a little slower then a majority of the other students.
Another great element is we get visits occasionally by people who work in the Film and Games industries. We had one such visit just recently, and while I didn't mention Aspergers specifically, I asked him in his experience as a 'Team Leader', how the industry suited people who aren't inherently social and prefer to be given their work and left to do it (or words to that effect - work in the animation and games industry is very team oriented and can involve meetings and the like). His answer: "There's actually quite a few people like that, you'd be surprised. They usually also do 'amazing' work."

well.. yeah.. might have gone off topic there but eh..
My point is. Find something you love. Find a school and a course structure that works for you. If you can, you should then do well at whatever you choose.

note: I'm a 'Mature Age' student (not the only one either), most of the students know I'm gay and the one's I've worked the most with know I'm an Aspie. There are probably a few that think I'm a 'bit odd', but there are more then enough that don't care about my quirks.

Ee gadz! I posted a small essay..

Oh yes, here's something I forgot... (what's that about aspies getting caught up on ideas and subjects?)

My biggest recommendation to anyone considering Tertiary education, and it was a point raised by a recent visitor to my Animation course;

If you're looking to get into a specific industry or type of work, go for a course offered by a school in an area where there is a lot of work in that industry. Even better if the school has close ties to the industry and the teachers/lecturers have worked in the industry themselves. You'll get a lot more out of the course, you'll have better opportunities to further your studies through internships and the like, and you'll have more chance to network.
There have been countless times I've heard of people getting work over someone who has better qualifications or higher quality work, or whatever.. simply because they know someone who knows someone who recommended them for the job. Be it a teacher, a fellow student, an alumnus.. whatever.

I went through college but I learned years later that a history professor interviened to stop the administration from expelling me because I was a menace to the image of the college due to some vague eccentricities. Later I was thrown out of two graduate schools but found some free courses offered as part of a teacher shortage hoax. (Of course the public schools all refused to let me student teach while I was taking these free courses which eventually went to an MS in physics. I took an additional graduate course in solid state physics out of spite after receiving a death threat to stay away from campus. Now I am finishing a PhD in both applied math and physics, my own studying that I did to design microwave weapons to foul up the neighbor's stereo had something to do with a most successful pass in my PhD comprehensive exams last year. I expect to graduate next spring.
     My academic advisor had a brother who is so grievously afflicted with autism that he cannot speak. She had sympathy with the human rights of people like me and there are people in the university who fight for our right to be included in being allowed to earn higher education. There were no such protection from abuse in the other universities that threw me out.
     There are two characteristics of the bad universities, the kind that will get rid of all non conformists. First, they extend conspicuously corrupt privileges to sports teams including sheilding them from prosecution when they go on drunk weekend rampages beating up people they see on the street who look different. Second, they have a Jeffry Dahlmer mentality towards living things. One school that threw me out is paying street people to steal cats and give them to the biology department for the purpose of infecting them with FIV to experiment on them as they die. Another school was supported by the tobacco industry. Such schools have required failure quotas and they will fire faculty that do not fail as many students as they demand, sometimes this may be as much as half a class. Stay away from such schools and shun them like child molesters.
     I have one last course to take in the Fall and I expect to finish my dissertation in Spring.

I would say it did. But then I happen to believe that discovery is the purpose of human existence and the uneducated do nothing to further that discovery. Its true that you could probably think of examples of people who were uneducated but had something to offer and were extremely successful; but those people are rare.

Please don't let one poor course keep you from furthuring your education!  I know that grades can be a problem, but I'm already noticing with my son that lack of good grades doesn't always mean you don't grasp the material.  With him, it's because (a) he works slower than average (which I think may be common for Aspies), (b) he gets easily frustrated by the process of trying to write down his thoughts (give him a dictation machine instead of a pencil and the difference is amazing!), and © he stubbornly refuses to conform to what the teacher expects v. what he thinks will make a great paper.

Somewhere there is a school that will recognize that your gifts are not accurately reflected in your grades.  Expect that it may take you a few extra years to complete college, but DO complete it.  You will never regret it.

Reading more of the posts above ...

The number one thing in picking a direction, I think, is to pursue what you love.  My husband made all his career selections for practical reasons and, while he makes a reasonable living, he will never shine and he hates what he does.  When you are in your element, you are more likely to shine.  The joy of pursuing something that feeds your soul is irreplaceable.

I hated grade school, tolerated high school, liked college, and really liked grad school. My closest friends are those I made in grad school, also.

If you can, do what you're most interested in.