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Old Apr 23, 2008, 10:31 AM
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Rapunzel Rapunzel is offline
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Member Since: Jun 2003
Location: noplace
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What opportunities you have for college will depend on your performance and your ability to do the work and the tasks assigned to you. You have good grades, and many colleges would love to have you.

You sound a lot like me. I can't remember for sure what my high school GPA was. My state didn't use GPA for high school at that time, in fact. But I graduated in the top 10% of my class, and was accepted at all of the universities I applied to at that level. I even had a full tuition scholarship at one of them. I was an honors student in high school and in college. But I didn't always meet deadlines, and some professors put up with that, while others didn't. I was in a departmental honors program my junior year in college, and doing fine. My senior year, I struggled with writing a senior thesis. I felt like I was done with it, and couldn't motivate myself to keep revising it over and over, and wasn't making deadlines for revisions. My GPA was above 3.5, but was on a downward trend in the second quarter of my senior year. They asked me to withdraw from the honors program, and that hurt. Then they didn't accept me to the master's program (where in that program almost everyone continues on). That was a shock. I appealed, and they said that I lacked the social skills to be in the social sciences. I started to think that my faculty hated me, and gave up on everything for a lot of years. I didn't even graduate until I went back 12 or 13 years later after bottoming out in life.

Now I don't have as many options as I would have had. I have a 3.9 GPA in the master's program that I am almost finished with. I've been hitting some rocky places lately. I don't think I'll ever get accepted to a doctoral program, and I'm going to feel very limited and likely resentful with the degree I'm getting. But it is better than staying at a $6 per hour job where I was getting beaten up and told by the director that i was too old and would never be able to advance.

Your life is your own, and your future is ahead of you. You can have good grades and be talented and still be limited by mental illness. But you can also overcome it and reach your potential. It's what you make of it, and how you handle your challenges. Get support when you need it, and communicate about your struggles. If I had been able to get the right kind of support when I needed it, my life would have been very different. Show your dedication, keep pushing through the hard places until you make it, and don't give up. Grades are not everything. The thing that will really move you ahead is to get to know your faculty members and help with their research, etc. Don't spread yourself too thin though. Concentrate on one or two things that you are most interested in.

There is discrimination against mental illness. Even online support communities don't accomodate people like me when challenges get to be too much. And saying that you have a mental illness isn't accepted as an excuse. But I know several people who have succeeded in spite of mental illness. You can be one of them.
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“We should always pray for help, but we should always listen for inspiration and impression to proceed in ways different from those we may have thought of.”
– John H. Groberg