S2E5 - Why High Achievers in College Crash in the Real World (AuDHD Edition)
S2E5 - Why High Achievers in College Crash in the Real World (AuDHD Edition)
Transcript
Speaker: Liora Natania
The people that I talk to who experience this, the more that we talk, the more I learn what's the motivator? Why do they wanna go back? And it becomes really clear that what they're struggling with in their day to day is lack of structure, lack of routine, lack of direction, and lack of community. And those are all the things that we get from college.
Hello, my friend, and welcome back to another episode of the Colorful Futures Podcast. I'm your host, Liora Natania, a neuroqueer HR consultant, executive functioning and career coach, and the founder of Colorful Futures.
In today's episode, we are talking about college. Big topic. I know, but specifically the experience that many ADHDers or AuDHDers, neurodivergent folks might have in college, and what happens when we graduate. Now, for myself, I discovered that I had ADHD and AuDHD much later after my college experience, I was in my late twenties, early thirties.
So as I look back on my college experience, a lot of things make more sense now that I know how my brain actually works. So we're gonna talk a little bit about what that experience might be like when you're going through those years of college, and then often the shock that comes after when we lose our structure and routine and all the things we become very used to, not just in college, but the 12 years of education prior as well.
If you are about to graduate, maybe you just graduated or you are still in that first year or two out of college. If there's one thing I want you to know from me, it's that what you're experiencing right now, whether that be anxiety or fear, nerves, anything like that, uncertainty, it's very normal. You're not alone.
You are going through a major transition coming out of college and entering, quote unquote, the real world and the world of careers outside of what, 16 plus years of education.
There's an interesting pattern that I've noticed with my clients who are between the ages of maybe like 23 to 26, where almost every time, one of the things they're considering besides different jobs or career pivoting or anything like that, is going back to school and going to grad school.
At this point I've learned it's a canon event for anyone in that age because the same thing happened to me and I've learned over time that there is a very strong reason for that, especially for ADHDers, AuDHDers, neurodivergent folks.
What happens when we're in college, like in undergrad, we have routines, we have community, we have structure. Within a couple years of graduation and you're in the quote real world, you start to miss those things.
Something feels a little off, and you remember just a few years ago when you were in school and you think, oh, well maybe the next best step for me, because right now I don't really know what I'm doing. I don't really know what I wanna do. Maybe the next best step is to go to grad school.
I'm sure there's many of you listening to this and you're like, I'm thinking about going to grad school.
Or maybe you're past this stage and you're like, oh, that was me. That is such a canon event. Or maybe you're not at this stage yet and you're like, I don't know. Maybe I would go to grad school.
But I found for myself that around 24, so like three years after I graduated was when I thought I should go to grad school. I was in my career for a couple of years. I had had at that point, I don't know, three or four different graphic design jobs. That was what my degree was in. And just things didn't feel aligned. I wasn't really happy in the jobs I was in even when I changed jobs.
I was like still kind of chasing that " what will give me happiness?" "Maybe this isn't the job for me." Maybe I just need to go back to school." And it's that thought of "maybe I just need to go back to school" that I find a lot of folks experience.
The people that I talk to who experience this, the more that we talk, the more I learn what's the motivator? Why do they wanna go back? And it becomes really clear that what they're struggling with in their day to day is lack of structure, lack of routine, lack of direction, and lack of community. And those are all the things that we get from college.
When you're in high school, the topic of college starts to come up and it's phrased or it's, it's framed as this thing that you need to do because it's what will help you get a job. Now, I think currently that mentality is shifting a bit, but in many cases that's still the script that we're given.
That's still the prescription that we're given of, oh, you go through high school and then you go to college, you just keep going. And you have to pick a major and you pick what your degree will be in, and that's what your career will be.
And it's like we're given this assignment of, oh, you're 17, you're 18. You have to decide what you're gonna do for the rest of your life, or at least you have to decide, you know, what that ticket will be. Oh, I want access to this job. So I have to decide what ticket am I gonna get? Am I going to be in biochem? I don't know what made me come up with that. Biochem, graphic design, uh, nutrition, like whatever the case may be, medical school, that's a whole other thing. Anyway, you have to decide your path will be.
So then we're told this is gonna be great. Like this is an essential step. This is crucial to everything you wanna do, and we're just sold this idea that college is this solution to basically our life so we're told that it's this essential next step for us, going from high school to college. And we might be very excited about that too. maybe you go out of state, maybe you move away from home and you get to have your own dorm, your own apartment, or pick your own classes and you get to have a fresh start.
And while college can often be prescriptive, it doesn't mean that we aren't into it and it doesn't mean we aren't excited for it. Both could be true. I know for me, I was really excited for it. I commuted half the time. The other half I lived near my school, never in the dorms. But there were parts I was nervous about and there were parts I was excited for.
I was lucky my family, you know, were open to me doing different things, but I did want to go to college. And I chose a college that I was excited to go to, art school. I didn't wanna go to a normal quote unquote college because really the reason was I didn't wanna take math and I didn't wanna take classes that I wasn't interested in.
Even art college required a couple classes I wasn't that interested in. But I was like, I wanna write, I want to draw, I want to design. I don't want to have to take math or science just because someone tells me I have to. So there was a lot of choice in that as well.
And you might be in a similar position where you're like, no, like this is where I wanna go. I'm really excited about the campus, I'm excited about the people that I met. Maybe you know someone who went there. So there's a lot to look forward to.
And when you get there, there's this new level of freedom that you have like you're given more autonomy. In high school we couldn't have our phones out, you know, but in college you could, you have laptops, like you just have so much more freedom. And you are still within a structure. And you have these routines and so you're able to have this transition between the strict structure of high school, but also most likely more restrictions in terms of how you can be and how you can act and what you can do. And college just gives you more room to grow and bloom and do whatever you wanna do, but you still have a schedule to follow.
one of the best things about college that you might not really notice in the moment is that all of your needs are met.
You're getting regular meals, you are having a, a regular social life, whether it's in class, out of class, parties, whatever the case may be. And you have a routine, but you still have choice in that routine, right? You go to class, you have breaks between classes, you decide how to spend your time. You have your local community on campus where you have your gym to go to, your library, places that you go eat, whether it's on campus or off campus.
And you have this life that, much of this life is crafted for you, but you get to pick your path. You get to pick your major. You get to pick what you want to eat, who you become friends with, what you do, how you spend your time.
You get to pick when you go to sleep, when you wake up, do you wake up an hour before class or 10 minutes before class? Do you get to class on time, do you not? Um, do you skip class Sometimes if I had to skip a day of high school, I had to like, check in with my parents they had to call the school.
If I don't wanna go to class, who, who am I gonna tell? Who am I gonna ask? So you have a lot of autonomy as you navigate college and all of your needs are being met, or you have an opportunity for all of your needs to be met.
So this is a nuanced experience as well, because there are plenty of folks who didn't have the college life that I'm describing. Maybe you had to work multiple jobs, maybe you had other people to care for.
Maybe you lived at home and commuted. Maybe your campus was really small. Maybe you didn't really have a campus. Maybe your campus was gigantic. So this vision that I'm describing is often what we are sold as the college experience, but it might not necessarily be how it was for you.
Even as I describe all of these things, your choice, your autonomy, all of your needs are being met, I think back to my college experience and those things were true. And one of the things I remember a lot is how much I struggled.
So even talking about like, oh, you get to pick your bedtime. Well, for me, my bedtime was whatever time I finished my homework because by the time I finished class, went to go get something to eat, came back to the studio to work on whatever I needed to, I basically was working and doing my projects nonstop. Several overnights allnighters, where I would stay up all night to finish something. And I commuted. So a lot of my time was spent like on a train, heading back home, coming back to school. I worked weekends and I didn't have much of a social life.
My social life was whoever I talked to during class and whoever was in the studio with me while I was working late at night.
Now whether you are following the prescription of your family and you're privileged enough to have your college paid for and you're going through the steps, focusing on your studies, focusing on the college experience. Or maybe you are paying your way through college and you're just focused on getting what you can out of it because you're paying for it.
It is absolutely okay and expected that we are going to be laser focused on putting one foot in front of the other, navigating each of our classes, each of our requirements, and just focusing on getting through that assignment, getting through that class, and onto the next one. And it's expected and normal for you not to be thinking about these bigger picture ideas of, what does my career look like five years, 10 years down the road?
What does my life look like five years, 10 years down the road? And I find even if you are thinking about those things, I think in college we're often just thinking about them through the lens of our career. Because that's what college is supposed to be for, right? It's supposed to be setting you up for your career.
So we're not thinking about, well, what is our life outside of our career? How do we spend our time? What are we interested in? What are our values? How do we live by those values? How do we embody them? What purpose are we giving ourselves that isn't oriented around our career? when we graduate, maybe you find yourself going right into a job and that I find is almost continuing that prescription, continuing that routine of you're like, oh yeah, this is what I'm supposed to do. So now you're in your job, you're working with many different people, and things start to shift.
Before you were in college and, you had a lot of choice in how you spent your time, but you also had a lot of structure. All your needs were met. Now you're outside of that environment and you're in your job and maybe you don't really like your coworkers, you don't vibe with them as much as you did the students that you were with.
Maybe the schedule is different. Maybe your commute is longer. Maybe it's just a completely different energy. And a lot of that can be exciting 'cause this is what we've been working towards is this job, this career, and the freedom that comes with it, the paycheck, the feeling of accomplishment that you've graduated and now you're, starting your job. I was one of those people, I started, a job right after I graduated college. They actually wanted me to start like the Monday after graduation.
And I was like, please give me like a week, two weeks to do laundry, like catch up on sleep after going through finals. And it was very exciting. I like got my haircut, I just felt like such an adult. Once I started to settle in to my job after college other things started to surface that I didn't expect.
So college gave me structure, gave me routine, gave me a lot of autonomy and choice, but I didn't realize how much that container and that given structure made a big difference. So as I'm navigating not being in school and having all this freedom, that freedom also brings a lot of responsibility and a lot of decisions that have to be made and different things that I, I have to deal with and own as an adult, as someone who's just navigating my career and, and just trying to be an independent person.
One of the things that came up was. Even just like my day-to-day rhythms and routines. This might not be true for everyone, but in art school, our classes were pretty long. You would have like a three hour class, sometimes a six hour class, where you would do like three hours and then have lunch and then come back to the same class for three more hours.
But in that class was just different pieces of it might be, 20 minutes of lecture and then you work on your project and then you take a break. Or maybe you, have freedom to, leave the school. In my photography classes, we would grab our cameras and leave the school and walk around and like, you kind of could do your own thing. Even in design, we could sit at our desk, we could sit on the floor. If we wanted to go work at the library, we could, as long as we were getting the work done and our teacher knew where we were, we could work wherever we wanted to.
When I get to my job, we have a cubicle we have a little desk. And when you're working, you're expected to be there. We didn't have laptops. We had a desktop that you worked on and you had to be there, like, I couldn't move around if I'm like, oh, I need to like go take a walk. That wasn't a thing. It was like we just sat at the desk and had to work. If I needed inspiration or if I just need to literally put my body somewhere else, there wasn't anywhere else I could go. It wasn't like in school when I could sit at my desk, the shared table, the floor, wherever I wanted to.
I also realized how much harder it was to make friends. When you're in school, when you're doing different activities, you will make circumstantial friends that you may end up getting pretty close with. Even growing up, I was in dance class and I would just become friends with the, with the girls in my dance classes.
I would become friends with the person who sits next to me in homeroom. I would become friends with the people that I would meet in the dorms in college, friends of friends, things like that. And so it just becomes a natural part of your experience to build that community who's going through this with you.
So all the people I met in college were also artists or I'd become friends with the other designers. I'd become friends with the illustrators who were taking design classes. And we were all sort of having this shared experience and shared interests. This is a side note, but this is also why years after I graduated, everyone I matched with on any dating app I went to college with.
It's the problem with going to a small women's college in a very queer area and you end up just matching with everyone. I'm like, oh, I'm fucked. I share all of this to say that if you are experiencing this, if you are feeling weird or we just like a little ungrounded in your post grad life, it is normal you are not alone. This is a common experience and I see you. I've been there, and there are things that we can do to make it feel less jarring. When I was experiencing my initial post-grad life the few years after school, I didn't even know that I had ADHD.
I didn't know I was neurodivergent, didn't know I was autistic. Looking back, it's like glaringly obvious, but that's a whole other topic.
You might not even be able to explain or really pinpoint what it is that feels off. Maybe some of what I described helps you put some language to that.
For me, that feeling came a few years later. I was around like 24. I had had a couple jobs in the graphic design fields, which is what my degree was in and in those jobs, like there just became a point where I wasn't as engaged in it anymore. The friends I had in school kind of faded away. My community kind of faded, and I was feeling a bit directionless. And I had this thought of, maybe this is the time to consider going to grad school.
And this is the time that I've learned over the years from working with various folks in different stages that if I have a client between the ages of like 24 and 26, maybe 23 and 26 without fail, 100% of the time, one of the things they are considering besides maybe like a different job or a different company, or maybe I'll go to grad school. And I chuckle whenever this happens because I'm like, yeah, of course you're considering grad school. So Canon, Canon experience. Because what happens when we get a few years out of college is that we go through maybe a couple jobs, maybe a few of our friendships fade. Our life evolves a bit, and we start to miss that structure, that routine.
For me, my student loans paid for a lot of the things I needed in school, including food, lodging, everything. So I also realized that part of what I was romanticizing about school, college, graduate school. Is having your needs met financially, having all your meals taken care of, having a structure, having a routine, having people that you meet, that you have things in common with.
And then I forget about all of the other parts that were really hard, and it's a lot different when you're going to school in your mid twenties than it is when you're going to school right out of high school.
Something important to consider is that whether you are about to graduate, you've just graduated or it's been a year or two, whether you have a job right out of graduation or you're still searching-- build a life outside of your career too.
Yes. We'll want to spend time searching for a job. Of course, we need to survive capitalism and that's the whole reason we went to school, right, is to get a job. Or, yes, if you've been lucky enough to have a job offer and you're getting settled in your career, that will take some energy too. But I want to encourage you to intentionally nurture the rest of your life too.
We might be told, especially by our elders, that your career is like the answer to everything, but sometimes our job doesn't check off every box that we want it to. Sometimes we're searching for work and we're coping with that stress.
When you have variety in your life, when you have other things that give you purpose, that fulfill you, that connect you to your community, to your loved ones, to your hobbies, we take careers off of the pedestal and we create a much richer life.
Whether that is you pick up a hobby or you return to one that you really enjoy, or you just create intentional time to FaceTime your friends visit family, or you join a local activity, club, organization, dance class, art club, Pokémon League, whatever you want.
Through these things, we will start reintroducing more of that structure, routine community, while maintaining the autonomy that you have.
That leads me to our quick tip of the week. This week's tip is about networking. I know cringe. When we picture networking, we probably think about a bunch of like boring people in suits with like name tags in a room making very awkward, small talk. And if you're anything like me, when I picture networking events, I picture myself in the corner with a drink in hand talking to no one, and just like absorbing everyone talking to each other.
Maybe if I've brought a friend who's really social, I'll end up conversing with the people that they introduce me to. But otherwise I'm just kind a fly on the wall. Not very exciting, not really something I'm interested in doing. Most of the networking events I've been to have been, I've been forced to go to from work or whatever.
One of the life changing pieces of advice I ever heard about networking was to stop thinking of it as networking and think of it as simply building community. So I talked a moment ago about how cultivating community through your interests and your hobbies and just the things that you like is a really important part of building a rich life that is not centered around your career.
But when we think about careers, we think about job searching, we think about having folks recommend us for jobs, and making really great connections that could lead us to what we really wanna do, networking is a thing that comes up. I wanna encourage you to think of networking as community building because when we go into an exchange, a conversation, an introduction with the goal in mind that this person will get us a job or will give us a lead to a job, that exchange becomes very transactional and it becomes hard to be genuine. I know for me and a lot of other folks, we don't like that transactional element. It doesn't feel good to us.
What I want to encourage you to do is think of it as community building. You can find a connection to a job anywhere you go. Because we recommend people that we like. We recommend other humans that we enjoy talking to, that we think of, that are top of mind, that we want to see succeed. And the foundation to that feeling is often friendship, or a friendly acquaintance. But what it boils down to is just a human to human connection.
So you could seek out networking events. I've been to some, there's a local, queer based organization for like small business owners and entrepreneurs. And I went to a, a networking event last year and it was cool.
I met a lot of people. I mean, they were all queer, met some neurodivergent folks and it was awesome. So you can definitely do those. I would seek out networking events like that, that are at least, check a couple of the boxes that make them your people, but you can meet people anywhere.
If you play sports or you're interested in playing sports, you can join a local group. If you like tabletop games, join a league, whether it's virtual or in person. If you like crafting, find a local craft group or like a stitch and bitch, something like that. If you like yoga, find a community yoga class, and talk to people.
At least with that foundation, you can talk to them about your shared interests. You can get to know them and just go into it almost as if you're just trying to make a friend. You never know, who you'll meet, or what they do, or who they know that can connect you to the next step, the next chapter of your career, or other opportunities, things that might interest you.
I've seen this happen even with a local basketball group that meets, I don't play basketball, but I follow them on Instagram. And I saw a post that a couple of the, the players there work in film. My partner works in film and I'm like, how random, like it's not a film networking group, it's a bunch of queers playing basketball.
And so that's just, uh, one small example of how this could manifest. So just that little reframe. Instead of networking, it's community building. Go to the places that you like to be, that there will be people there that you will like.
Because remember when we get a connection for a job, like we wanna work with people we like. We want the person referring us to a job to know us and to know the type of place that we would thrive in. And that happens when you approach it human to human, not a transaction. So that is our tip of the week.
I hope that you got something out of this, whether it was just something that you can try or just the validation that you aren't alone, and we see you. In the next episode, we're gonna be talking more about the logistical pieces of job searching, For those of you who are early in your career, maybe you've just graduated, you're about to, getting your applications prepared, how to translate all of your experience in a way that hiring managers will resonate with, and helping you get that interview.
So that's all we have today and we'll see you next time.