I never had a "staff" while going to college. I got my BS before I ever had any mental issues & had the best time of my life even though it took so much work for me. I always had to work harder than everyone else to get those straight A's I expected for myself.....I wasn't satisfied with anything else. I ended up graduating with a 3.25 GBP which I was pretty proud of considering I went from Music to Computer Science. My striving for the A's allowed me to come up with at least the 3.25 which has always been my phylosophy. If I strive for the best & I come up with a little less, I will at least be better than if I didn't try as hard.

Two years ago, I decided to go back to college & change my career direction to interior design. I got very involved & became treasurer of the Interior design club on campus & the person that held down the relations with the professional clubs that were out there to help along the college students. I was only taking 3 classes & actually pulled the straight A's that I expected of myself. I found out that disabled students has a group on all campuses in the US colleges/universities. They work with your pdoc's DX & provide you depending on your DX, special considerations that will help you get through college. These things include the ability to tape lectures, to take tests in a quiet location rather that in the noisy class room. They also allow more time to take tests & finish projects, & I am sure that there are other things that they allow for other DX's. It is only between the instructor, the disabled students workers, & no one else even there is anything going on. I found it helped me at timed, & at other times, I didn't need the help, but when I needed the help, at least it was there for me.

My Pdoc was concerned about my going back to college, & my psychologist was very happy about it. I got through that one semester & realized that it wasn't what I really wanted to focus on, but would rather have gone into Computer Added Design for interior design since my love for computers just can't go away. Unfortunately when the semester was about to start I was in the hospital for 10 days dealing with asthma. Then my mare had my filly(Izzy), & my Mother's cancer started getting worse after her surgery she had in June. I got trapped into a situation with my Mother because of her desire to go home & not into a nursing home that ended up causing me to catch the home care RN stealing my Mothers ID. Everything that I went through with that ended up causing a horrible PTSD reaction that the Dr's didn't understand & wanted to define is as only anorexia rather than the complete package of what I was going through. I was hospitalized for 2 months having to have a Central Line with IV nutrition.......& with all this going on, there just wasn't room for going back to college.

I had to realize myself that the time wasn't right for me to go back to college & no one told me what to do. I feel is it important for you to make up your decisions about your college & the classes you choose......then after thinking it through thoroughly then discuss it with them. That way, they realize that you have put enough thought into your dicisions that they will understand & trust your thinking. They may even have ideas that you haven't thought of & you may have to take some time to add those thoughts to what you have been thinking. Use everything put together to help you make your decisions.....but you are the one in the end that needs to do what you feel you are able to do. Sometimes it is good to start a little slower than you would really hope to.....just to build up your confidence in the fact that you are able to do the required work & can do it well enough to satisfy yourself. College/University is hard.....not at all like high school. The expectation is that you are now an adult & are expceted to act like one & be completely responsible for completing your work on time & no excuses (like my dog ate my homework.....lol....believe it actually happened to me one time very embarasing....but thank heavens for computer backups).

The staff that are concerned about you are very caring, but it seems like you need to let them know how important it is for you to make your own decisions....& that you would like to have them talk over your decisions with you & add any suggestions that they think may be necessary, but that the final decisions need to be yours so that you can feel that you are in control of your life......which is really part of what college is all about.

Your staff needs to realize where you want them to fit into your decision making process so that they are working with you & not controlling you.

Maybe if you can get them to understand your needs, they will be able to be a better help to you & their thoughts will be better respected.

Just a thought, being a very independent person myself & not liking people to tell me what to do without taking my thoughts into consideration. You sound very similar to my thinking, so maybe you can get then to "work with you".

I hope you can work out the relationship between you & them......school is enough stress without having to deal with people who are trying to help you but end up controlling instead. They need to know how you feel about what is going on......that is very important.

Debbie