Is It Possible To Succeed At A Demanding University While Coping With Ongoing Struggles?
It was 2:07 a.m. when my phone buzzed from the couch, where I was waiting up for my younger daughter’s late soccer carpool. The text was from Lila, my oldest, in her second year at a top engineering program three hours from home: “I failed my first thermo quiz. I’ve slept three hours or less every night this week. I can’t even make myself walk to the dining hall alone. I don’t know how much longer I can do this.”
I tossed the half-folded laundry in the hamper, grabbed my keys and a half-gallon of her favorite lemon ginger tea from the fridge, and hit the road. By 5 a.m. I was sitting across from her at a chipped picnic table outside her dorm, watching her pick at a loose splinter while she talked. She’d been diagnosed with generalized anxiety the spring of senior year, and we’d both thought she had it managed with therapy and small habits. But the unspoken pressure to keep up with the program’s default pace – 15 credits a semester, an honors research track, a design club all her friends joined – had ground her down. Every time she opened her course app, her chest tightened. All over social media, her classmates posted photos of study sessions and internship offers, and she couldn’t shake the feeling that everyone else was doing this perfectly, that her struggle meant she didn’t belong. That’s when the question hit me, sharp and unanswerable in that moment: Is this even possible? Can someone succeed at a school this demanding while struggling this much every single day?
Over the past two and a half months, we’ve been figuring that out one small step at a time. It hasn’t been a grand turnaround, and Lila still struggles far more than any of us expected when we celebrated her acceptance two years ago. But we’ve stumbled on small, concrete changes that have made it work, for now.
The first change was the hardest for me to wrap my head around: we threw out the default timeline. Lila was set on graduating in four years, same as all her peers, so she was cramming 15 credits and a 10-hour a week research internship into her already overloaded schedule. We sat down with her advisor that weekend, and he didn’t tell her she should drop out. He just pointed out that more than half the engineering majors at the school take an extra semester to graduate, and no employer asks when you finished your degree. Lila dropped one general ed class and stepped back from the honors internship, cutting her credit load to 12. That change alone freed up 10 extra hours a week for sleep, therapy, and just sitting on her couch watching bad TV when she needed it. The concrete thing I tell other parents now is this: check your student’s school policy before you assume they have to stick to the standard timeline. Most schools don’t advertise that you can drop to a lighter load temporarily without losing your scholarship, your spot in the major, or your financial aid. It took 20 minutes of digging through the registrar’s website to confirm Lila would be fine, and that’s 20 minutes well spent.
Next, we finally pushed past the embarrassment and applied for academic accommodations. Lila didn’t want to go to the disability resource center because she said her anxiety wasn’t “bad enough” to count, that she was just being weak. I sat with her in my car after that first weekend and filled out the online application together, uploading the diagnosis she already had from her high school therapist. Two weeks later, she was approved for extended time on exams and permission to take tests in a separate quiet room. That small adjustment changed everything. She told me after her first midterm that she didn’t panic halfway through when she saw everyone else turning in their papers early, because she didn’t feel rushed. She got a B on that exam, after failing that first quiz a month earlier. She also started using the free counseling services included in her tuition, something most students never even bother to access.
She still struggles. Some weeks she texts me at 9 p.m. saying she can’t get out of bed to study, that her chest hurts too bad to walk to lecture. She has a C+ in physics this semester, and she doesn’t get straight A’s like she did in high school. She missed two discussion sections last month when her anxiety flared up bad. But when I ask if she still wants to be there, she says yes. She made one friend in her coding class who also struggles with anxiety, and they get coffee after class once a week. She comes home every other weekend and sleeps for 12 hours straight, then goes back.
The practical lessons we’ve learned are small, not dramatic. Instead of pushing your kid to “just try harder” or immediately suggesting they transfer, try these three specific things first: Cut one non-required thing from their schedule right now, whatever is draining the most energy. Apply for accommodations even if you think their struggle isn’t “serious enough” – most universities offer them for mental health conditions, and they never show up on a final transcript. And when they worry about getting a lower grade than they want, say this exact phrase: “A C is fine if it means you get to stay here and keep going.”
We still don’t know how this will end. Some semesters will be harder than others, and we keep the option of transferring to a smaller, less competitive program on the table for down the line, if that’s what Lila wants. But right now, the answer to the question is yes. It is possible. You don’t have to stop struggling to succeed. You just have to adjust the path to fit you, instead of forcing yourself to fit the one everyone else is taking.
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