I’ve never been so busy, I made the life altering decision to go back to college at 30 to get an engineering degree. I generally like math and I love building things and messing with electronics, it should be the perfect fit. But after starting at calc 2 and now doing 5 or 6 classes full time, working, and planning a wedding. I feel like I’m stretched thin.
I’ll get off of school and my brain feels like molasses. I’m medicated but I still feel like everyone is learning at twice the speed as me while I reread the question to make sure I actually understand the wording.
There’s some of you out there who are engineers, scientists, doctors with ADHD, who go out and do community stuff, go to the gym, live life and even socialize.
How? How do you do it? How do you keep up with such a constant schedule and try to understand new concepts every day on top of that? How do you not just curl into a ball and closing up into yourself to stop being overwhelmed?
I feel like I’m doing life on hard mode and it sucks
Ok, as someone who did well in engineering school, I cannot imagine juggling all of that. I didn’t get diagnosed until 30 so I was unmedicated in college, but I lived at home and quit my pizza job when classes became more demanding. It was still a shitload of coursework and I spent most of my time at school, including all day on the weekends.
How I managed it back then was that I would do all my homework at school with my classmates, so basically body doubling. Otherwise I’d get home and screw off.
Even without ADHD, your current lifestyle would be a tough row to hoe. You are living on hard mode.
Working full time, trying to run a household solo, and have hobbies is a mess even though I’ve been out of school for almost 10 years. Most meds have caused issues for me, but I’m back on the merry-go-round to find the right combo because I am very much not managing my life, lol.
So I guess my advice is the following: be gentle with yourself, try to work in groups when possible, and perhaps consider switching meds if you feel it’s a limiting factor. The last one could be dicey though since instability could make things harder for you.
One last point: the students who are failing and struggling aren’t exactly going to announce it. Don’t sell yourself short and assume everyone is doing better than you!