Tag: adhd

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What Makes College So Hard

Many think that what is hard about college is living in dorms, or the difficult classes or meeting new people. And those things are hard. But those are not the biggest things, the biggest difficulty about college is all the things you no longer do that you did in High School.

What makes High School easy and college hard is routine. When you entered high school after middle school, the routine didn’t change. You still woke up at home, went to school, went from class to class, had lunch, finished up with classes and then maybe had an extra curricular activity. Your parents made food for you, you did homework, went to bed and then on the weekend, you might hang out with your friends. Entering college completely changes this.

If you live at home, your routine will change but not as much as living on your own or on campus, but there will still be big changes.

First, college has no start and end time for classes. You may have a morning class or you won’t. You might have a class following he first or you wont. You might have 10 minutes to get to class or you might have a break of three or four. You might have classes five times a week or two or three. And this will change every quarter or semester depending on the college.

This lack of routine can be very disorienting for those who depend on a routine but didn’t know it because of the one imposed on them in High School. The difficulty of keeping track of class, homework, exams will be a large chore. It will be an even larger chore if you live on your own or with roommates or in a dorm.

When you were home, your parents watched you and so there was no running out on Tuesday with friends for donuts. Now it’s every Tuesday and Thursday and Monday is laser tag. There is always someone with easier classes or a slacker who wants to rope you into not studying. There’s always a party or an event. On a campus with thousands of studentes and hundreds of clubs, it is easy to get roped in for an over achiever into the extracurriculars. The problem is that the college classes are far more difficult but the don’t seem like it.

You will go to lecture and think you get it. You will read the book and think you get it. But then you will write the essay or see the exam and you will realize, that you did not get it.

The difference between high school and college is not amount of work, but the level at which you are expected to execute it. And that level is dependent on the hardest working, smartest and best prepared student in the class. You won’t know the student or know how hard they work, but you will know how you stack against them come Midterm or Final when you get a C or worse.

The problem is that you skipped a few lectures and a few lectures in a class that meets twice a week is ten or more percent of the class. You are trying to catch up but you can’t because you have other classes to catch up in. So what do you do? You drop the course so you can focus on the others. Now you have to retake that class and you are on probabation.

This is a story all too many college students have seen. Many of them are actually undiagnosed ADHD or Bipolar or Depressed which is even more expressed when in college. The symptoms can get exacerbated if you are no longer participating in sports, eat poorly and sleep poorly because you are chasing boys or girls, or procrastinating with video games or social media.

So what do you do!??

Well, you plan for it.

There are chapters on studying and doing well in this book. But in essence, it is important to remember what made you successful in High School and then increase that ten fold. You sleep well and eat well. You plan out your quarter. You make lists of things you have to do and put them in a planner. You look at the readings and divide them by day so you don’t get behind and you join study groups to stay on top of classes like math and science.

When you get behind, you go to the professor and TA and get office hours, even if it costs you embarrassment. Embarrassment in office hours is much more acceptable than retaking the class.

You also make sure to work out, have consistent routines and if you feel like you are having trouble or overwhelmed, you see a school counsilor or psychologist. You confide in friends, you talk to your parents and siblings, you keep your community and rely on them.

College is difficult because it knocks you into a completely new routine without a routine, it adds more work, robs you of community and adds a ton of distractions. But it doesn’t have to, not if you’re prepared.

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Master’s Thesis (with ADHD)

Writing a thesis is no cake walk. People can spend anywhere from weeks to years working on their Master’s Thesis. The reason why I think it can be so difficult is because at no time in our graduate education does anyone actually teach us how to write one, how to prepare for one and therefore, nothing really prepares you for it.

I attempted to work on my methods and outline and introduction a year into my thesis. It was for nothing. For one thing, you may not truly understand your thesis as a Master’s student because you work on a project for a graduate student or professor who have years of thought behind the project. Another reason is that your methods and ideas are ever changing. The third reason is that the research brain is so different from the synthesis brain and it is virtually impossible to use both.

This is what in part makes the thesis so difficult. Because as you write the thesis, a lot of times new ideas or thoughts will come to mind on data analysis or perhaps you notice something in the data that is wrong. So you have to switch back to programming and coding and analysis that you may have in someways forgotten after weeks of not touching the code. Then once you get the new data or plots, you go back to the thesis, where you have to again skip the papers, read what you wrote and try to make sense of it all.

For me, there was an added issue of becoming diagnosed with ADHD. People with ADHD fall into two categories: those who fail at life and those who continuously work to compensate for ADHD to marginally succeed if just avoid constant failures. My life was pockmarked with people thinking I was smart but lazy and careless. This is normal for someone who has undiagnosed ADHD. It was normal for me to have slow starts, to be up until 12 am before I start work ( I’m writing this at 1am), it was normal to wait until the professor emailed me (deadlines are a godsend for adhd people). So I will go over some of the tactics and strategies that I developed to make progress on my thesis. I was on medication for less than a week (it helped A LOT) but I couldn’t continue due to side-effects, so all of these tactics helped me and will help you ADHD or not.

  1. Read How to Write a Thesis by Umberto Eco
    This is an old book but he writes so well on why you write a thesis, how to make a bibliography, how to create a logical dissertation, how to spend time writing etc etc etc. This book just makes you feel more prepared and like you know what is expected and where you are going. I read it months into the process and once I did, I feel it accelerated things.
  2. Keep a notebook and write in it.
    Having a notebook helped me have a place where all information was placed but also where I could write ideas and tasks. There are many good resources. A book by Fitzgerald said to put in KP for key point, * for Action Item and ! for an important idea that allows you to see what you have to do. One problem for me is I forget to read my notes, but it is good to have them.
  3. Journal
    Writing in a journal was very helpful to keep my thoughts in place, to review what I did, the mistakes I made, and what else I have to do. Even a short entry of “didn’t get anything done” was great because then I would think why I didn’t get done. One of the issues of ADHD is a lack of introspection and understanding what you’re thinking, doing, and why. Journaling helped with that.
  4. Deadlines
    I hate talking to people about failing, but as months dragged on I realized that I need accountability. As it turns out, accountability is great for people with ADHD as it puts a fire under our buts. I told my professor that I would let him know about my progress every Tuesday, not for his sake but for mine. It helped a lot!
  5. Spreadsheets
    Spreadsheets with as much information as I can get on my experiments that I can quickly lookup. Each tab in the spreadsheet had important information about the files, about the data. The more organized it was, the easier it was to go back and find the information I needed in my writing. Overall my files were a mess and it was hell to find things, but the spreadsheet with all of the plots and data simplified things. I still made many copies and screwed up and got lost, but it was better than nothing.
  6. Support Network.
    The draft I sent to the professor is atrocious. One issue with ADHD is being terrible at editing because of a lack of ability to sight details. So I had to enlist friends (those poor souls) to read my terrible writing to help me find the logical missteps and terrible grammar and spelling. The more people read the thesis the better. To help them out, I would send a section at a time, and then as they worked on the next, I’d fix the one they sent me and then forward it to the next person. This way I was going through several rounds with every person. One thing I did was to have people who understood the science least edit first so that clarity was fixed as well as grammar and spelling and then I would send the drafts to the people versed in science who I would not want to torture with bad grammar but instead want to review my scientific thought process.
  7. Routine
    The more you can create a routine the better. Running, meditating, lack of drinking, working all day, making sure some work gets done, writing out a daily plan, and then working to stick with it are all things that helped me make progress. I even had a plot with the number of hours worked per day to show myself if I am doing better or worse. There is nothing harder for someone with ADHD than a long term project that requires a lot of reading, a lot of writing, and a lot of thinking, so the more systems you can create, the better. People with ADHD have to move, it helps us think but humans, in general, do better after moving, exercising, calming. Making blood blow through the brain and then taking some time to just sit and de-stress is helpful for all people, but it is a must for anyone with ADHD. When I did not do this, my progress slowed to a crawl.
  8. Print Out The Papers.
    I had to read over 100 research papers. With the terrible memory, I needed to take notes, I needed to print them out (it’s not the same as reading them on a computer) and I had to review them over and over again. So if you have to read a lot of research paper, get a printer and print them out. It will help. An additional thing that helped was stapling a blank piece of paper to the front on which I wrote the name of the paper, the name of the first author, the year, and then important notes and references. This created a one-pager reference (learned about this from Astronaut Chris Hadfield). So when I was writing and needed to find the reference, I just went and found it by looking up the first page.
  9. Side Projects
    My wife hates them but the more things I had to do, the more progress I made. When I had all day to work on the thesis, my brain which is incapable of keeping track of time would waste the day. But if the day was filled with things to do, it would actually get more work done on the thesis. It created more pressure and that helped me progress.

I’m still not done with my thesis (although I’m closer than I ever was). I’m sure with medication, I would have finished a while ago. However, I am also very proud that I’ve done this well in spite of not being medicated. The positive thing is that I also developed some techniques that I can use for the rest of my life with many other goals that I set for myself (like a PhD) and perhaps help some of you. So if you have a thesis to write, and you are taking a long time, check the problems you have, it may not be your fault and design your own system that will help you finish your goals. It’s a lot of work, but if it was easy, you wouldn’t be doing it.

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Finding Focus- The Real Battle Of Being a Student.

focus

The first month of January of 2018 I took on a big goal for me: focus. Focus is elusive for me and most other students. It is something we strive for but for me, with a clear case of un-diagnosed and untreated ADD, it was not easy to deal with. Like other people with ADD I’ve had my share of  half-started projects which were always half-worked on, an obvious effect of lack of clear focus. Finishing something creates a feeling of pride and accomplishment, and lack of it  is always upsetting and depressing. So for the month of January, I decided to develop focus by doing one thing at a time. No social media while working, no task switching. I’m going to do one thing at a time and I’m going to do it well.

First Week

When creating a habit, I find the first week to be the most important and the most trying. It is the week for laying the foundation; if you can lay a good foundation, you will have a very good week two. Step one was to find tools to help me. The first tool was planning. I already plan my weeks in advance but now I really needed to use the block schedule I learned from Deep Work to the best of my ability.

Each block is an hour long. I know that I have a hard time starting and I lose focus midway through. The thing to help with that was the Pomodoro timer. I have one on my laptop and it  helps to start it at beginning of every hour. It is advised to have it for 20 minutes to get started but I set it for 45 minutes. 45 Minutes is great to do good work and at end 5-15 minute break is great to stretch. I can really get into the groove and if I get distracted, I see that I have 20 more minutes and it helps me to push through to the end.

On the block schedule, I really try to put in everything: bus ride home, what I do during that ride, lunches, breaks, rest time. This way I have a realistic week. I also started to keep track of hours on different projects. Planning out the week with most important things to do and how much time I want to spend on school, work, side projects really lets me know where my time is going and how to plan things. I also put at the top of each day the one thing I need to do that day, it can be homework or a specific task, but it is the one thing I can’t forget to do. I even put specific homework problems or sections of code I plan to write for projects. Breaking up work like this for my GRE testing really helped.

Another thing that happens with my ADD brain is that when I’m working on a single task means getting many random ideas. Ideas for new projects and thoughts of things I “should be” doing come up. The mind doesn’t want to focus and usually, I’d go off on the tangent thinking: ” I remembered this! I can’t not do this now or I won’t do it later.” So I get the non-urgent thing done while not focusing on the important thing. This causes me a lot of lost time in the end because I don’t get deep into the task to do it efficiently and on time. The way I solve it is that my weekly schedule planner is near me. On the back side of that sheet is blank and so I write down these ideas and task on it. Then when the break arrives I try to do the tasks. If they are really important, I do them, if not, I don’t. This way I get my main task worked on without interruption and still remember to do the thing I remembered to do while working on the main task.

While working, sometimes silence is terrible. However, music that I used was either foreign music so as not to listen to words or music that has no words.  Listening to podcasts was most often terrible, especially those which have really interesting information. So save those for the block hours when are not busy: lunch, bus ride, etc.

So the first week went pretty well. My Pomodoro timer keeps track of me working so I can see that at the beginning of the week I was doing well and then it dropped off, so I’ll have to work harder or think of new habit forming techniques to keep on task.

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