Cameron ADHD Blog (Part 4)

Cameron’s ADHD Blog – My College Experience

For this next portion of my blog (4th of five), I will go over how my ADHD has affected me at college. When I first began attending Landmark College in Putney, Vermont, I was an emotional wreck. I could not bare being so far away from home, my friends, and my family. Being out of my comfort zone meant my ADHD would kick into high gear. The first couple weeks of college were tough for me. While I was making new friends relatively quickly, I was still uneasy about being far from home. When classes started, I was doing awful. I was showing up late to class and my grades were poor. I refused to do work due to laziness and I believed my assignments to be too hard when they really were not. In the end,  I realized that I only had myself to blame for my lackluster performance at the start. I had difficulty paying attention and getting myself motivated to do schoolwork. But I eventually grew more accustomed to the school with each passing day and realized that the people there were just like me. They had disabilities that hindered them also, with some of them having ADHD like myself as well.

Around the end of my first month at college, things seemed to be looking up for me. My grades had improved dramatically, I had made tons of new friends and I had been arriving to my classes on time with no absences. Overall, my freshman year of college went well despite the rocky start.

However, my sophomore year would see me struggle yet again. One of my classes that year was an advanced algebra course. I had taken algebra the previous year so I thought this would be a piece of cake. Safe to say it was not. The instant I walked in that day, I was told how the class worked. We would get a quiz every week which did not sit well with me at all. My ADHD made it really hard for me to concentrate and stay focused during the class and on every quiz day, I was lost and felt helpless. I could never figure out what I was doing. I just did not understand the material.

I failed every quiz until one day, I decided to do the unspeakable – something I hoped I would never have to do. In an attempt to catch up with everyone else, I cheated. I copied off of other people and I used my phone to calculate the equations because I felt there was no way I could figure these out on my own. I thought that I was in the clear. Unfortunately, I was caught in the act and written up for plagiarism, which sent me into a deep depression, made me want to hurt myself and drop out of college. I felt that I could not do it anymore. It was too hard and I wanted nothing to do with it.

Fortunately, I was able to get counseling. I met with a therapist on campus for three days and we would talk about what happened. She asked questions on how I felt and I answered with how my mood was at the time. After the third and final session, I felt like myself again. Those three days were exactly what I needed and I put that bad experience behind me. The math teacher did not alert the school that I cheated, so that saved me from humiliation and getting expelled. I then dropped the class to avoid that ever happening again. If there is anything I learned from that experience, it is that cheating is never the way to go and cheaters never prosper. After that fiasco was over, my life got better. Dropping that class did wonders, as my mental health gradually improved and the rest of my classes went well. I passed all of them and completed my sophomore year with a bang.

My junior year went very well with the only setback being that a lot of my friends either transferred or graduated, so I do not have that many left at college. I will be going into my senior year this fall and only time will tell how my ADHD will affect me then.