That time we failed in college

Kelly and Leti discuss their college experiences, highlighting the challenges of managing ADHD. Leti shares her hyperfocus on writing Korean alphabet and Mayan hieroglyphs, while Kelly talks about playing solitaire. They reflect on their high school and college years, noting the lack of understanding and support for ADHD. Both emphasize the importance of seeking help, utilizing resources like tutoring and the health office, and finding supportive study partners. They stress the need for better awareness and accommodations for students with ADHD in higher education to improve their academic success and overall well-being.

Follow us on Instagram or YouTube @wth_adhd

Chapters

• 0:00 College Experiences and ADHD
• 4:35 High School and College Planning
• 10:39 Challenges in College
• 11:19 Strategies and Coping Mechanisms
• 38:17 Impact of ADHD on Academic Performance
• 38:39 Support Systems and Resources
• 40:23 Advice for Students with ADHD
• 40:42 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Transcript

Speaker 1  0:00  
Hey, Kelly, yeah, Letty, do you remember that time we failed in college? You

Speaker 1  0:35  
Hi, hi, morning. Morning. How are you? I sound a little gravelly today. Hi, we had a cold run through the family a little bit and shoot, I didn't have any like symptoms, no sneezing and running, but I felt like my head was like in a motorcycle helmet that was way too tight. Oh no. All week, and I felt really tired, but I feel much better. I think it's just a little residual. So sound great. Thank you. Thank you so much. I'll be on the that sounds great aisle. You can find me there. What aisle numbers had? Oh, anxiety crafting aisle number five. I love that aisle. It's my favorite. It is, do you want to hear my hyper focus for the week? I would love to I'm hyper focusing on writing Korean alphabet, Hangul, I'm sorry, and I'm hyper focusing, come again, on writing Mayan hieroglyphs. That's what I've been spending, like a whole week, hyper focusing on. I've been feeling like patience, so

Speaker 2  1:39  
confused right now, like I literally never thought I would hear those words come out of anybody's mouth,

Speaker 1  1:47  
because I hyper focus on languages. I've been like, listening to things about the Syrian empires, and I don't know this

Speaker 2  1:56  
is what he's life like, you're all just getting, like, a little glimpse, and you'll get lots more glimpses, but this is what she does. I

Speaker 1  2:05  
am a lingua file. I do love languages so much the more bizarre and out there I want to solve, like the English valleys

Unknown Speaker  2:17  
undeciphered.

Unknown Speaker  2:19  
Do you know what I hyper focus on this week.

Speaker 2  2:23  
Yeah, trying to get out of um, card mistress in my solitaire game to move up to. I don't know what the next princess is in it, but I'm, I'm playing a lot of solitaire.

Speaker 1  2:39  
A Solitaire is great. I used to be literally, I can

Speaker 2  2:43  
literally just sit there. I sometimes I Spider Solitaire, cards,

Unknown Speaker  2:47  
Spider Solitaire. That's my thing. Oops.

Speaker 2  2:50  
I should have gotten that one. Oops. I should have gotten that one too. Oh,

Unknown Speaker  2:57  
my God, my coffee is way too hot.

Unknown Speaker  3:00  
Okay, so our topic for today?

Speaker 1  3:03  
Yes, so welcome to wth. ADHD, you're right. There's that. I'm Letty, I'm Kelly, and today we're going to talk to you about college and college experiences and ours, how amazing they were, and how

Speaker 2  3:20  
amazing the best college experience, great,

Speaker 1  3:23  
and especially with with, you know, 20, you know, hindsight is 2020, we now know that we had ADHD and that those were the reasons that we were just batshit, like, horrible, yeah, just the

Unknown Speaker  3:39  
worst student. Well,

Speaker 1  3:40  
I wouldn't say I've worked ever, but ever, definitely challenging in many arenas. So I think we'll just kind of skip through back and forth. We'll talk about some of the highlights that come into mind, and then we'll talk about some strategies, because we both have kids who are going to be entering college in the next couple of years, and we want to provide them with some strategies as well. But if you're in college, you know, I want you to first stop hating yourself, and my god

Speaker 2  4:11  
please, because love yourself. You're an and you have ADHD and you feel hopeless, yeah, we got to turn that around.

Speaker 1  4:20  
And if any of the things we talk about rings true, you have ADHD, go get checked out, get help. There's so much help.

Speaker 2  4:28  
This is a great better. This would be, this will be a great episode for teenagers. I listen to I will try not to drop too many F bombs, no. And it's gonna happen. Parents and I'm a sailor. We're both sailors, and we're going to do our best, but it's going to happen, but it's, it's, it's

Unknown Speaker  4:48  
just how we express ourselves, and it's not a bad thing.

Speaker 1  4:52  
So let me actually before we go to college, let's go to high school.

Speaker 3  4:56  
I don't how'd you do? And I want to go to high school. So how'd

Speaker 1  5:01  
you do in high school in general, like, grades and things C's, C's, okay. I had a's and c's because things that interested me, I would do really well in and things that didn't interest me, I would just, like, squeeze that, and then, like, towards the end, I'd bring up those B's and A's, sometimes it depended on how much I got punished. How about planning for college? Because you grew up here in the US, did your parents, like, talk about it? Did your counselors talk about it? Friends like, what did you know about college and going and stuff like that.

Speaker 2  5:41  
My sisters went to college, my my two older sisters, so I just knew I was following in their footsteps. And all went to local college because my parents told us they couldn't afford to send us away, which is a whole other story, sorry, mom and dad, but it is true that we'll leave that for another day and then, so I just went along for the ride. Honestly, I didn't want to go to college. School wasn't my thing back then, before I knew why school wasn't my thing, because I just didn't feel like I was smart enough. I every time I studied, I never got good grades. So I didn't want to go to college. I didn't want to have to go spend four years doing all that again. That's like freaking torture. But I had to, because my parents told me, and that's what we did,

Speaker 1  6:39  
okay, and then you applied to colleges.

Speaker 2  6:43  
I applied, got into colleges, and I got into both, but one of them was away, so I couldn't go to that one, and so I went to the local university here, right? No, state or state, Cal, state, yeah, okay. And commuted to school, basically. So for me, maybe we were immigrants, and,

Speaker 1  7:07  
you know, my dad certainly didn't go to college and my mom didn't go to college. Went to, like, trade school for pharmacist. I think

Speaker 2  7:18  
my parents didn't go to college either, by the way, like they graduated high school, and that was it.

Speaker 1  7:23  
And we never really talked about college, but I did see, like growing up like that college was like a thing, like in movies, you know, all the 80s movies, you went to college and and then people talked about it in school. And I guess it's something you did, but I had no idea what it took to get into college, like grades mattered, or extracurricular things or test scores, right? Like there was no test prep for me, or anything. Like I didn't even know what the SATs were. I didn't understand it fully, right? And then I really was so bored in school, and I had skipped a grade, and then I wanted to, like, just not go to 12th grade and graduate, because I'd taken almost all my classes through 11th grade already. And I could have probably, like, taken, like, one more thing in summer and graduated, right? But I was only 16 at that point and then going to college. I mean, I was just turning 17 when I applied to colleges, so I wasn't legal, and my parents didn't let me go out of state, obviously, because I was a minor, and so I applied to local things, but I they didn't want me to drive until I was 18, so I had to pick something I could bike to. So those that's how I picked college was, what was the one I could bicycle to that had a major that I could, like, tolerate, okay, yeah, right. Like, really bizarre. And so, I mean, I put my grades into an envelope and all this stuff, and they weren't grade great. And, you know, I wanted to do, like, NYU, I wanted to do film school, USC, like, those were the things I really wanted to do, because I was all about film. I'd been in film, you know, middle school and high school, that was the thing. And I loved the magic of cinema. That was my my love. And, well, those were off the table because, also we had no money. I didn't even know how I was going to pay for it. And then I got this grant, this Pell Grant to go for the first semester was covered to go to CSUN, to Cal State, Northridge, and so I was like, yeah, so I did it right, and that one I could bike to and go there. I wish I would have had, like, college planning, like, visited universities, those kind of things. I didn't do any of that, either, none of that. And I think I'm gonna do that with, you know, the kids, because Absolutely that's, I think it matters. I think my experience would have been a lot better, more informed. And that's really the thing is, is going there a little bit more informed about what I was doing? Because not having a plan is really not great for people with ADHD.

Speaker 2  10:23  
I kind of had a plan because I knew I was going into radio, television, film. Yeah, that was my only plan. Was my plan. And that's what my sisters did, and I just followed in their footsteps, but like but I love TV, TV. I wanted to be in TV. You wanted to be in film. I wanted to be in TV. So,

Speaker 1  10:43  
so, you know, I enrolled in some classes that they recommend that you take. And I took the math placement, English placement, all that stuff. And it was so hard to manage this experience, right? So for me, getting to something on time was already like this major issue, because I just didn't have a good sense of time. And I would dawdle and stuff, and then I had to bike to school. So most of the time my first class, I would arrive like sweating because I'd been paddling like a beast with my backpack on water bottle helmet. It looked like, like salt dried on my face. You know, I would come into class just a mess. And of course, that's like, really not the state of mind you want to be in. No learn, you know, I'd sit down my for my first class, which, whatever it was, and then I kind of, like, need time to actually, like, get in that space, that zone. So of course, I'm not hearing like the first half hour, whatever it is. If it's like a hour class

Speaker 2  12:00  
and then high school, I don't know how you studied, but I didn't, no, I didn't really study either, like I would always night before, real quickly, yeah, and honestly, I have to read things like 85 times to retain it. So I did. I only read it once, so I didn't retain anything? Yeah,

Speaker 1  12:21  
I would open the book like the day before or the night before, rather not the night before, the night before, maybe around 11, because I've been procrastinating doing all kinds of other things, because I knew had to get that done. And then I would just like read the book and then hope for the best. And usually that worked out really well, but cross your fingers things were getting never worked well for me, were getting harder, and I didn't know how to take notes. Did you know how to take notes? You

Speaker 2  12:49  
know what's so funny? I didn't. But once I got into college, I realized I really had to take notes because I was gonna freaking not make it. And to be honest, my notes were literally the wrong things. I had learned how to take notes over the years, and that had really

Speaker 1  13:11  
great drawings of my professors. Oh yeah, I tried to take notes. I drew a lot of things in my margins. They're mostly drawings and words. Occasionally I

Speaker 2  13:25  
thought I just wasn't smart. That was my whole thing. Oh, I 100% believe that sisters that I wasn't smart to very are, sorry not were are very, very bright women. My oldest, you know, A's AP, classes, college credits, before she even went to college, was going to be an astronaut slash doctor. Got to college, realized she liked film, switch majors, yada yada, which just a very smart, smart, smart, smart woman, same with my my middle sister. They're both really smart. So I just said, I'm the street smart Sister, I'm not the book smart sister, they're the bookmark bookmarks. You're the bookmark smart sisters. I am the street smart sister, and I am the sister that really did a lot that they didn't do. And I was that was me. I like. I was okay with being me. I was fine with it.

Speaker 1  14:32  
So I thought I was kind of this imposter in college where everyone else knew all the stuff, and I knew nothing, and I have to keep just pulling it out of my ass last minute I would turn out these like 1215, page papers in an hour before class in the library, sitting at this thing to print and back then, you know the experience with computers being fresh? Oh, my God, it was. Like to bring your stupid floppy disk, and you'd get a virus from the library, because someone would put one on there, erase all your things. Oh, it was so stressful. And and I would just pull out these papers out of nowhere, and then I'd be kicking myself, like, why couldn't you have done that two days earlier, three days earlier, just wild or broken down into little pieces. I just did not have the capacity, and I had never been shown how to manage projects. I guess that's what we'd call them now, which is homework. I guess it's a project how to manage these things into smaller, doable pieces, and they just seem so big. And this gets us into this area of executive function that some adhors like to call the wall. And the wall is this looming thing you have to accomplish, paper reading, even laundry. Can be a wall, any task that might require some sort of some form of planning. Like, if you want to clean your house, where do you start? Right? You start the table. Do you start in the kitchen, bedroom, work your way out. Like, where do you start? And it can be so overwhelming, because you want to do everything all at once. Everything has this equal importance, right? So everything's coming and stabbing your brain. Do this, do this, do this, do this. And it's so overwhelming that you go, nope, I'm doing none of it. And you sit down on the couch and watch TV instead, while having this like just rolling anxiety inside, it's so crazy, then you have to do something. So I bit my nails, eight over eight for sure, or then I would like leave and go do something super impulsive, because that feeling had to go away, and I needed dopamine, and had to somehow make up for all that, and then flash forward to the night before a thing and and then I knew it. So why wasn't the wall there? That impending pressure is needed in some way to help you start sometimes, right? But that's not a help. You have to take your cues, right? But that's not a healthy system. So another system you can put in place. I don't know if this ever worked for you, but sometimes a body, someone else's body, with you in the room, can help you start. So that would be in college, you know, a study partner partnering up with someone who can start. Like, if I'm watching someone start doing it, it can help me like, oh, I guess I can open my book too. It could be just as simple as that, or get my papers out. And once the pencil in hand, it can start. Or if then I'm sitting there tapping and just, you know, dozing off or whatever, or not thinking about things, that person can look at me and like, what are you doing? And that can help me bring myself into that space too.

Speaker 2  18:12  
I don't know. I do think it's from ADHD my lack of memory,

Unknown Speaker  18:19  
because I do not have a lot of memories.

Speaker 1  18:22  
Yeah, so work, college, working memory and short term memory and impacted I have very,

Speaker 2  18:28  
very, very few memories of being in college,

Unknown Speaker  18:37  
actual school. Yeah,

Speaker 2  18:40  
I do remember being in the library with, like my sorority sisters and studying, but I do remember not really getting much done, but that's because we were being social, and that was a lot more fun than studying, and whenever I would do papers and stuff like that, I remember sitting in my parents house, in the office, playing Cirque du Soleil music.

Unknown Speaker  19:09  
That's a interesting choice. Well, because

Speaker 2  19:11  
it's musical, it's not there's no words. So you it's I can't listen to music's music with words if I need to do something. Does that make sense? Yeah, so it's music, and I remember sitting typing out papers. And that's like, I swear to God, I don't remember sitting in classes at all.

Speaker 1  19:35  
So, but you have enough type ADHD, so I'm wondering,

Speaker 2  19:40  
remember teachers. I remember one teacher only because, when my sisters had that teacher, she was a man. Wait, she was a man. She was a man. And then when I had her, when I had her, okay, as the teacher, she. Transition to a woman. Mind you, this was 30 years ago, so that's really, I swear to God, the only teacher I remember.

Speaker 1  20:11  
So you were probably having a lot of inattentive episodes where you would

Speaker 2  20:16  
remember walking across campus to classes. I don't remember any of

Speaker 1  20:21  
that, right? And that's thought of that ADHD brain where you're just having this constant flows of thoughts that are transient. They come in, they go out, they come in, they go out, and they jump from thing to thing, and you're so much in that headspace that you're not accounting for your environment a lot. And that can, you know, be part of why you're not recalling you didn't have anything tying you to that experience. Typically, we remember things that have some sort of difference, some sort of change, anything that's really more routine we tend to kind of go through and not acknowledge as much. And when you're not acknowledging your environment and your experience, you tend to have poor recall of that set. I

Speaker 2  21:11  
remember a big experience. I don't remember what class this was, but I remember going to this class, getting a coffee from the vending machine, drinking the coffee. And that was really the first time I had coffee because I needed it. I heard about it, and I needed it so bad. And I had my first coffee buzz before that class. So you were experiencing, yeah, and that, I remember, and I went every class, I went and got a coffee,

Speaker 1  21:39  
right? So that stimulant you needed it because your brain didn't produce enough. But

Speaker 2  21:44  
I don't remember what the class, what class it was, where I was going, nothing else.

Speaker 1  21:49  
Remember that your body felt right or more righted, having had that stimulant wild, I don't remember

Unknown Speaker  21:57  
anything that's so weird. So

Speaker 1  22:01  
I got through my first semester of college, and that was the Pell Grant, and then I didn't have any more so I had no money to go to school. I'm, I mean, nothing, right? So I had, I got a job and basically dropped out for the semester to get more money, to get to go back to school. And then that kind of became my cycle. Is I would go and and work and then take a semester off and go back in but I kept changing colleges because I felt like, maybe, maybe I wasn't in the right environment. Like, yeah, this isn't the place for me. So I went to, like, community college because maybe I needed to go there. And Community College was good because I found a mentor. There was a teacher who who, like saw me and got me, and she presented things to me in a way where I really could maintain that level of interest. And it wasn't just a hyper focus on a topic, she stimulated my mind with the right questions and things that kept me engaged. She was such an excellent, excellent teacher, I'm going to just shout out to Mrs. Pat Allen. She rest in peace. She was an amazing influence, because for the first time, I also saw that who was giving you that material can be like amazing, and it's not just the material, right? And I have

Speaker 2  23:48  
no teachers that were influential to me, because I do think they all thought I just wasn't a smart kid. So I have, I knew not, maybe my theater teachers, that's it.

Speaker 1  24:00  
And theater was a really great place, and production was really great because there's a lot of impulsivity. There's a lot of dopamine flowing, right? You're doing funny things, you're creating, and creativity is definitely an ADHD jam, like we're very creative people given the space an opportunity to do so, and especially if someone is, like, starting a project for us, where we don't necessarily have to do all the planning and creating by ourselves, we play a role in something right like, there's a play. Well, the play is already written out. You don't have to write it. There's a role right now there. You know, you've already, like, picked a role that you're gonna play, so you have this focus. You're able to get into that smaller piece and not have to focus on set design and the camera and, you know, the mixer and the lighting and the music, like you don't have to do all of that while you enjoy all. Those elements you're able to to take part, because it's been kind of given to you that little component. Oh

Speaker 2  25:09  
yeah, even though I was a horrible actress, acting was great.

Unknown Speaker  25:13  
So I think a lot of creatives,

Speaker 1  25:16  
you know, do have ADHD, and I think we gravitate towards the arts, and that can be really great, but it can also be really terrible, because you're not finishing projects. You're leaving things, you know, undone, uncompleted, and and then they kind of hang there, and you feel bad about it, and you get this really awful self talk coming back that you can't finish anything, and then why should you even start the next one? And this can really lead to these depressive periods that you also often see with people who are creatives, where they kind of stop for a while and they go back in, or they have all these things that aren't finished. So the other part that was hard for me for college was taking tests like, I'm not even like, it's it wasn't necessarily because I didn't know the material, but that attention component of executive function to read a question completely, I would skim the question and then Look at the answers or think of the answer, but I wouldn't really like read the question and parse it and understand what they were asking, because I knew there was a time limit. I had an hour to get it done, and I felt like I had to rush and like get through it all. And I know that I'm terrible with time, and that if I read something, I can think about it for hours. But I didn't have that privilege right there, like I couldn't do it, so I would just, like, rush through it and answer, and then the other thing I didn't do was check my work, because once I was done, I got all of it. It was so stressful, and my brain was so depleted that I wanted to be over and get some dopamine somewhere, do something fun, or else, or hours already is somewhere else, and so I wouldn't check my answers, and I'd like not answer some questions. I'd skipped questions. That's what my daughter does. Like, it just didn't even answer them at all, or half answer stuff. It was like, written out, or math things. Like, I'd have the answer answer them, yeah, but I wouldn't write out how I did it, so they didn't know how I did it. So they'd mark me off right, even if the answer is right. Because they want to look at your thought process. This almost got me really, really bad. When I was doing my masters and I had to do my comprehensive exams for us, we had multiple choice, like, 100 questions, and then we had a written part too, right? And so I, like, just went right through those multiple choice right? But the number 100 didn't stick in my mind. And I'd finished, like, the first the front of the Scantron, and then it just sat there. And I was like, Why is everybody still working? Like, what's going on? And I'd finished so fast, like, oh, well, I guess I'll just wait until we're done. And I sat there probably, like, for a good 15 minutes, and I was like, Well, I guess this one time, since I have all this time left, I could go over my answers, because this is important. And then I realized that there was a blank page after the multiple choice questions, and then there's this whole section of case studies of patients having strokes and whatnot, and a whole other thing I had to Holy mold. I mean, I would have just failed if I hadn't done that. Just completely failed, right? And I didn't know I had ADHD. So I didn't know I needed systems in place to to function. I didn't know I needed to have a checklist for taking a test. I didn't know I needed a checklist for studying or a particular way to take notes that engaged me, right? Like I don't type notes. If I'm typing on a laptop, I don't hear anything. I can't do notes on laptops, which is what most colleges currently do. And that's like the worst thing for people with ADHD one you have tabs, you can browse the entire time, reading other things than what the lecture is, and you'll record it maybe, but then you have to listen to that thing. But you already sat through it. You don't wanna listen again. But having that motor task of writing, I wrote, yeah, it makes it so that you're not just taking down everything. You're doing a little more analysis in line where you're grabbing more important pieces. And I think that. A really great, effective way to take notes, but I certainly didn't learn to do that until I was, like, halfway into bananas.

Speaker 2  30:08  
I mean, to be honest, every test I took, I would literally be the first one done sitting there waiting every test

Speaker 1  30:23  
that was me too. I would just sit there and I just rush and want to be over with,

Speaker 2  30:28  
Yep, yeah, I would be done. Never look at it again. Every test was like that, and I would be like, How am like, how, how how am I the only one who's done? How am I the only one who's done and my grades reflected them? Because I just chose answers because I didn't, I didn't know any of the answers. I

Speaker 1  30:54  
don't know how I got A's. I don't know. Honestly, I have no idea. Well, here's

Speaker 2  30:58  
the thing, I didn't get A's, and I didn't get A's in college, and it took me five and a half years to finish college. Oh, I've got you b Yeah, but I did it consecutively.

Speaker 1  31:12  
Oh, okay, so let's just mine was over a decade, yeah,

Speaker 2  31:17  
but you didn't do it consecutively. I did it. A consecutive five and a half years, and my last semester that half a year, I took 12 units in summer school, and I split my time between Northridge and Santa Monica. Santa Monica, City College, I literally went to school from 8am to 10pm for four weeks. Oh, I can do anything to finally graduate. And then my parents said, Kelly, we never we didn't think you'd make it. And I made it, and it was like a compliment to me back then, that was a compliment, because nobody thought I graduated.

Speaker 1  31:56  
Well, I thought that what would be a really great thing to do is change majors, because another thing is impulsivity, right? And I thought I was really interested in film and stuff, and I worked in it for a while too. And then I was like, maybe something else, and I changed majors, and kind of had to go back to the drawing board and start all over again, right?

Unknown Speaker  32:23  
That is bananas.

Speaker 1  32:26  
So I think that's something else too that you know. So I think when we look at college as an experience with ADHD, and you're not medicated, the whole component that's really weak with ADHD, if executive function just comes crashing in, it's planning, time, management, attention. And there's also the social component that creeps in, where that anxiety can be looming. One of the things is, you like I did. I hung out by myself most of the time because I just didn't feel like I belonged. I had so much anxiety over people realizing right that, you know, I didn't know how to study, or I just didn't know what I was doing, and so I didn't want to share that experience, and I didn't want anyone to tell me that was fucked up because I already knew it and and so that led to a lot of not socializing in classes and things like that. But then there's that other component where you do need to, like, let loose, and you don't think about that consequence the next day, like, if you went drinking or things like that, you know you're coming to school just really wrecked because you hadn't, you know, planned on it, and not only that, you forgot that you have a test, or you forgot you had a paper due. And that impulsivity really plays into not being able to turn things in on time, and not just not functioning well.

Speaker 2  34:03  
Well, you could have done what I did. You do. We all know I joined a sorority, right? Uh huh, yes. Sorry, parents, here we go. In that sorority from my I belong to, there was a drawer at the house. Oh, Kelly, tell us about the sorority drawer. Inside that drawer

Unknown Speaker  34:27  
were folders, and each folder was a

Speaker 1  34:30  
class. It was, was it like how sororities function? Holders? Yeah.

Speaker 2  34:35  
So basically, what was inside those four folders were tests for each teacher. Oh, that, Oh, that was at the college share the knowledge. So if you were having a hard time, you could go in to the drawer, pull out the test that you were going to have the next day and study that test. Now there wasn't every single test in there. Sure so those classes I didn't do very well in. I failed nutrition, but I got A's in all those classes that I had 10 days in. And I also had a boyfriend who was in a fraternity. Oh, did they have a drawer in the fraternity? You know, that's so funny. I don't remember if they had a drawer or not, to be 100% honest, but they had pledges, and one of those pledges was a TA in my political science class, okay, if I had to pick my political science teacher out of a lineup, I hated poli sci it's not my thing. But if I had to pick my teacher out my professor in a lineup, I couldn't, because I literally never went to one class and got an A plus in it, because my boyfriend was the president of eternity and told the pledge he had to take my tests

Speaker 1  36:01  
and give me an A black collar university and have them crazy.

Speaker 2  36:04  
Your degree isn't that crazy. Oh, for political science. Give me a break. I got A's in all of my radio, television, film classes because that was the stuff I love, interesting too. I didn't need tests, right? For those like, I knew the answers. I didn't. I didn't need the I needed the answers to everything else in college,

Unknown Speaker  36:27  
everything else,

Unknown Speaker  36:30  
and I failed nutrition, so I couldn't take nutrition.

Speaker 1  36:32  
I got an incomplete in poli sci because I just stopped going. I couldn't, oh, my God, it was

Speaker 2  36:38  
I thank God I never went, because that's just like, worse. But here's the thing, I made it through college. I passed,

Speaker 1  36:48  
you know, I did too. I made it through and I think I needed that space. You know, it took me over a decade, but I did mature through that time, sure, where I began to have some systems in place to be able to study, right? You had to cut. You had to Yeah. So I think now the thing I really wish, and these are the things that I have regrets about, I wish I would have walked into the health office at the university and asked for a test for ADHD. Because I could have, you know, had some sort of support, or even just started, you don't know what it was, no, but I could have maybe gone in there to to do counseling. Had I known,

Speaker 2  37:34  
didn't even know back then, I nobody would have said anything. Well,

Speaker 1  37:39  
what I'm saying is why we need to look at these symptoms. So if a teacher is telling you that you need to just apply yourself, if a teacher is telling you that you could be so good at this, but you're not turning your work late like as a teacher, I think you should recognize when you can make that suggestion to that student that maybe there's some sort of executive function difficulty and help them, rather than tell them that if they just studied harder and did things harder, they could do really well, because harder isn't the answer. The answer is having tools, for example,

Speaker 2  38:21  
but I feel like professors, depending on the professor, they're gonna say you should have learned that in high school. That's

Speaker 1  38:29  
the thing. You might provide training for academics. I'm sure there's about that now, right? About paying attention to these signs for students, because agreed, yeah, so many accommodations in college. You can have a note taker. You can have someone take notes for you. You can have more time on exams, right? There's things that are available to you. You can also probably get free medication from the Health Office, honestly, other things, that's where I went and got birth control for the time, and it was free. Yes, so there's so much available, but you don't know. And I think even high school counselors should be providing this information to the teens. Hey, when you go to college, visit the Health Office. They have great resources. They have counseling. They have, you know, actual psychologists who can talk to you if you're not feeling great. There's medical doctors available. You can even get vaccines, all this stuff to go in, at least, to help off the health office

Speaker 2  39:34  
at colleges. I mean, my experience was tremendous. It was great.

Speaker 1  39:39  
Yeah, I love the health office, and then, like, if you're struggling with classwork, you know there's tutoring on campus. There's all kinds of things that are available that you don't think of when you have ADHD, you just don't think about it. But if you know ahead of time and can tour these things, meet some people that can help support you. Yeah, then you're gonna have a better experience.

Speaker 2  40:03  
And I think thankfully, we're gonna definitely facilitate that with our kids. Yes, 100% they really, I don't want them to have the same experience I did, and you did, feeling so shameful and and feel like I'm gonna fail all right time. And what's so silly is you're so smart. You know what I mean? Like, that's what's the silliest thing about it is you're so smart. The fact that you could think that you're not smart and gonna fail is just mind blowing to me. And now I know I'm not stupid. You're not, isn't that crazy? I'm actually probably, like, as smart as my sisters you are. I'm probably as smart as them, but I just never learned how to be smart. Book smart. Book smart. Let's just, let's, let's do that. Book smart. I'm I'm very street smart, but book smart is my

Speaker 1  41:02  
is my nemesis. I can just picture like on the street, like I'm street smart

Unknown Speaker  41:08  
and Danna, look at me. I'm street smart.

Unknown Speaker  41:13  
So not street

Speaker 2  41:19  
anyway. But I did have fun in college too, though I know you didn't, only because I socialized the majority of the time, and learning about my socialization there because I can remember being exhausted after socializing and not and thinking I'm just hungover or I'm, you know, whatever, but literally being mentally exhausted and having to separate and disassociate for a couple days and disappear to just kind of sit in my place. I did that a lot in college, too. Well. Remember doing that, you know? I take that

Speaker 1  41:59  
back. I love school and and it's not the college thing of of the whole experience that I loved. I love learning, right? So I had this really great geology course, and it would just, you know, amaze my mind, and then, and I would, you know, I do hyper. Never got my mind. So I love topics, but then my problem was, is all a sudden I wanted to be a geologist, or I took like an architecture course, and then I wanted to be an architect, right? And those impulsive, hyper focused things really like led me astray to not maintain my focus. So I have all these like courses that I took that had nothing to do with my major, also, I took human sexuality. That was fun. Well, I'm sure it was

Speaker 2  42:51  
one of the classes was all about penises and all the different types and shapes and sizes, and they showed all the different shapes and sizes of penises so that you could see there was nothing wrong with you if you have this type of penis placid

Speaker 1  43:10  
occur. You know, that's a lot of great card, but I don't think we need that right now. But, you know, that's what I did, really. That's how we're going out. Um, all right, I took a sexual deviance course,

Speaker 2  43:23  
interesting, I mean, but it was, it was fascinating, wasn't it? Well,

Speaker 1  43:27  
I mean, in college, you're supposed to be all this stuff and figuring stuff.

Speaker 2  43:32  
I learned so much more than all the different shapes and sizes penises. But this is the only thing that I remember from the class? Well, let me funny, let

Speaker 1  43:43  
me move off that for just a gentle moment. I think really what we need to look at too is because college can be so disheartening and so difficult that you do think it's not for you. But the truth is, is that it is you get so much from that experience and from that growth. You go outside of your norms, and it helps you really become yourself. You figure out more about yourself through the beginning.

Speaker 2  44:18  
It's yeah, it's definitely the beginning, yeah. So

Speaker 1  44:21  
you know, if you're out there struggling, just know that one we feel you, and a lot of people feel you. Find your people.

Speaker 2  44:30  
Yeah, find groups. And there are groups out there you will find them.

Speaker 1  44:33  
Find that person who really helps you study because they don't have ADHD and they know how to do it, and don't be afraid to ask for help. Yeah. Don't be afraid. It's It's okay. There's, everyone's got their struggles and in many different ways, and I think it's okay. It's okay for you to feel that way, but don't do it alone. Share

Speaker 2  44:56  
exactly, I think that's a big thing, and recognize. Amazing these troubles that you're having, really pay attention to them and talk about them and get them out in the open, and it'll just make your experience that much better. Yeah,

Speaker 1  45:13  
there you go. So I think we can wrap up our awesome college days. I love it, yeah, there you go. I'm gonna go back to college and get a PhD. And I

Speaker 2  45:23  
was like, I just billion years and never, ever, ever go back to college. But that's just me. Okay, hi and bye. Wthd, oh, my god. ADHD. ADHD, uh, Kelly and Letty, signing off

Speaker 1  45:40  
episode. Thank you for being with us on this episode. Oh,

Speaker 2  45:44  
and send some stuff into us. Send us your craziest college experiences, or what you're scared about going to college about,

Speaker 1  45:51  
or just your experience of how you got through it, and maybe what helped or and what didn't help. Those would be really great for us to share as well. We'll

Speaker 2  45:59  
post something on our Instagram, and you Guys can place your comments there, bye, bye.

Unknown Speaker  46:29  
This has been a hiats, me ADHD production.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai