Aspies For Freedom

give it a shot! if it works you can gain a few things right? and if it doesnt work then you wont have lost anything right? so in my figuring... from what you say you have a lot you could gain and nothing to be lost am i right?

My partner was a physics major at UC Berkeley -- from Freshman year trhough his PhD, and he said it was a great place to be Aspie -- the Aspies were in the majority.

I go to UC Davis (to study Animal Biology, which is one of the best places to do it), and I love it. Don't let less-than-perfect grades hold you back. When I graduated high school, I had a 2.78 GPA (typical Aspie situation - A+ in classes I was interested in, bad grades in classes I wasn't interested in). I read that the average GPA of students accepted here is somewhere around 3.8... Obviously grades aren't the only thing they look for in students.

I didn't have the grades in school, but I had lots of other stuff. I did well on standardized testing such as the SATs and SAT IIs, but those tests are easy. It was mostly the extracirricular stuff I did - I spent most of my spare time doing things that pertained to my major (also my obsession)... I have like five fish tanks (including a tank for native Californian fish) and seven snakes, most of which are California natives. I spent a lot of time hiking and studying local fauna in their natural ecosystems as well. I have read many, many books on animals, anything from field guides to birds of Northern California to books on primate psychology.

I included everything I did in my application essay (didn't say anything about Asperger's though), and that was enough to convince them. Just concentrate on your strong points, and you should be fine. Aspies are lucky in that they tend to have obsessions and interests that are attractive to colleges, which I think a lot of NTs don't have.

Going to college is/was a good idea for me.

I think you should only go if you're really interested in getting a degree. If not sure and you can either get a job or have a year's break after school to really assess your options, it's best to do that instead.

It also depends if you have to leave home to attend university. This suits some people but for people like me, it left me open to bullying that I was unequipped to cope with. There was no disability support officer then either, except maybe for people who were legally blind or profoundly deaf.

It has to be a personal choice, rather than just drifting into it because that's what your teachers and/or family want for you. It's also expensive, so you need to weigh up whether or not the expense is worth it, given that we often struggle to find work even when we are well qualified.

Also, it has got to be a course that you are personally interested in and really want to do with a passion. If you aren't very interested and committed, it will soon become too hard.

Getting high wages shouldn't be the sole motivation for doing further study. Enjoying a particular area of study and wishing to make a career in that or a similar area is a much better reason. If possible, it's always better to see if somebody else you know a bit from your home town or over the internet is going to the same place so you have someone you know.

Plus, I think it's wrong to think that the only way to become a worthwhile person is to do formal tertiary studies and go for a highly-paid job. Not everybody is suited to spending time at university.

This sounds very scary but you seem to have triumphed over much of this adversity which says a lot for your determination.

Also, you learn a lot in the university of life. It's also very expensive to get a degree, particularly in countries where you have to pay back the loan even if you don't get a job afterwards.

At least in Australia, you don't have to make repayments in general until you earn above a certain amount. If I did another degree, I would ask for extra money to be taken out of my pay to put aside to offset the HECS/HELP debt.

Try practically impossible.  Most employers in the U.S. don't give a rat's rump about a high school education (a bachelor's degree is seen as being equivalent to the high school diploma of yesteryear...and not without reason).  In many, if not most, cases it doesn't even matter what you studied, just that you have a degree in something.

As for informal educational achievements...well, at best they count for nothing with employers (or, more specifically, with HR types).  In some cases, less than nothing.  I've known HR managers who were openly contemptuous of self-education.  They'd see something of the sort on a résumé and just laugh and toss it out.

Seriously, if you can find the time to take a few classes through DCCCD,  CCCCD , TCJC, etc. do so.  Even an associate's degree is better than nothing, and I believe you can largely complete it at home (heck, the first three semesters in Texas are mostly concerned with the stuff you should have covered in high school anyway).

Oh, that's a little different (that's my situation).  On the plus side, you may have enough credits to get a two-year degree pretty easily.

My biggest single problem was that I just couldn't get through freshman English.  I could have tested out in a trice, given the chance, but I washed out of two English classes because I couldn't maintain a journal to the lecturers' standards (woke up, broke fast, went to classes, went home, ate dinner, went to bed), and a literature class left me utterly baffled.

By my second semester at UTD (it was a two-year school back then) it was obvious I wasn't going to graduate.  Even so, my resignation really tore me apart.

Me too, only I'm not so generous.  It took longer than it should have, but I finally realized that others were just taking brutal advantage of my good nature.

I know, but pushing forty and being unemployable sucks...especially in the U.S. and especially in Texas.  And it happens faster than you can even imagine.  At least you have the advantage of youth.

I'm pretty much exactly like that as well, espcially with the intolerance of laziness. If I'm not doing anything useful, I'm not happy (I even bag my own groceries at the store instead of waiting for someone else to do it for me). I'm the type of person who complains about having to take 10 minute breaks at work every two hours (it's some law I think). I also often do work during my lunch...

I went through the entire reading list the first weekend.  When the discussions started, however, the other students were finding all kinds of occult profundity that I'd somehow missed .  Moreover, they had all felt (or professed to have felt) some kind of deep emotional connection with the work that I just couldn't share.

In the end, I just got out and took the "W".  Employers were beginning to examine GPAs then and I couldn't afford an out-and-out failure.

Now I realize it was all just BS.  Since then, I've spoken with authors who had the same reaction to literary critics (i.e., "What the %*#@ are they talking about?")

Clearly the curriculum has changed since my time.

EE then CS.  In retrospect, I should have majored in anthropology (the only class that ever really engaged me was a Cultural Anthropology class I took to satisfy some prerequisite or other).  Foolishly, I decided to major in something more "profitable."

The punchline is that by the time I started seriously looking for work, the tech employers were only interested in hiring Asians (principally very well-educated Indians...they advertised lots of positions, but only to justify more work visas).  I'd have been better off as an anthropologist.

(Kids, let that be a lesson to you.  Study what you like, not what you think will get you a good job.)

Short answer, "this and that."  The long answer is very long indeed.

At the moment I'm living off a rather small inheritence.  I'd be completely SOL except I worked out an arrangement with astonishingly cheap rent (and on a lakefront, no less).

In fact, if you and the family ever get an itch to fish or mess about on a boat or something, PM me.  I can't be more than an hour away and there's certainly no shortage of lake at the moment.

Hmm, then you probably don't want to hear that last summer wasn't particularly bad apart from the drought.  The last really bad summer must have been about four years before you were born (it was followed by the last really bad winter).

Also, unless there are serious reasons for not living at home whilst doing your studies, I think it's better to do them from home.

What I didn't care for was all the infernal politics and some people sucking up to the professors. Because I didn't know about the Asperger's, I tended to blame myself if I didn't speak up in class or if I were afraid to approach people I didn't know for help. It was all typical aspie behaviour but back then it was put down to shyness and all I needed to do was "try harder" and all would be okay.

All the same, it was also a positive experience as I met lots of new people and became somewhat less withdrawn than I was prior to leaving home.

If I had the time to live all over again, I would live in a mixed dorm. Having 5 brothers meant I got on okay with guys in general. I didn't seem to get on so well with the females though as I was too unusual.