Is It Possible to Succeed at a Demanding University While Struggling With Overwhelm?
The rain streaked my windshield so bad I could barely read the student health center sign, and the hash brown I’d grabbed on the drive was going cold in the cup holder. I’d already been waiting 45 minutes when Lila’s text popped up: Can’t do it. I’m sorry. I just sat in there panicking and left. That was last October, three hours from home, at the competitive engineering program my daughter had worked four years of high school to get into. That same week, she’d cried to me over the phone: Is it possible to succeed at a place this demanding when I’m struggling this much?
I’d driven up after she failed her first chemistry midterm. She’d skipped three lectures the week before because she couldn’t make herself get out of bed before 10 a.m., and she was convinced everyone else in her 300-person lecture hall was staying up until 2 a.m. studying, acing every test, and never lying awake staring at the ceiling panicking that they’d made a mistake. Everyone else looked fine, she said, so why couldn’t she be fine too?
When she finally climbed into the car 10 minutes after that text, her hoodie was soaked through at the shoulders, and her eyes were puffy from crying. I didn’t say “it’ll be okay” or “you’re so smart, you’ve got this.” I’d already learned those phrases made her shut down. I just grabbed the extra dry sweatshirt I keep folded in the backseat and handed it to her, then turned the heater up a notch. We drove to the carnitas taco truck off campus that she’d loved since freshman orientation, parked in the lot, and ate our tacos in the quiet while the rain tapped on the roof.
A lot of people had opinions by that point. Her grandma suggested transferring to the local community college, then a state college closer to home – why put yourself through all this stress? Her dad suggested taking a semester off, resetting, and coming back when she felt better. But Lila didn’t want to leave. She just didn’t want to have to choose between getting her degree and being honest about how hard it was.
The first thing we did that I had no idea about before this: the university’s disability resource center doesn’t require a childhood diagnosis to approve accommodations for anxiety. We met with a counselor at student health, did the evaluation on campus for no extra cost, and within two weeks Lila was approved for extended time on tests and a private testing room. That one change cut her test-related panic by more than half, she said. Before that, she’d freeze up halfway through a midterm just thinking about the clock ticking down with everyone else scribbling around her.
Next, we sat down with her advisor and made small schedule changes, not big, life-altering ones. She dropped one of her five classes, dropping her from 16 credits to 12, which is still enough to stay on track for four-year graduation. It cut 10 hours of lecture and homework a week off her plate. Then we swapped a large, required general ed lecture – 400 people, curved grading, two big midterms that made up 100% of the grade – for a small 20-person seminar that counted for the same requirement. This is a trick most new students and parents don’t think to ask about: almost every degree requirement has multiple options, and small classes are almost always less overwhelming than huge lectures for anyone struggling with anxiety or overwhelm.
We also changed how we check in. I used to text her every day: How’s your day going? Did you go to lecture? How’s that paper coming? That made her feel like I was checking up on her, not checking in. We agreed on a new system: 10-minute voice note from her every Sunday, no pressure to answer any of my texts during the week if she’s too overwhelmed. If she needs me, she can call or text any time, day or night, and I’ll answer. No lectures, no unsolicited solutions, just whatever she needs. That one small change made her way more likely to reach out when she’s struggling, instead of hiding it to avoid letting me down.
I used to think that success at a competitive university meant you didn’t struggle. That if you were good enough to get in, you should be good enough to get through it without missing steps, without panic attacks, without failing a test. But what I’ve learned in the last year is that almost half the kids on that campus are struggling with something – they just don’t post it on Instagram, they don’t talk about it at family dinner, they don’t admit it to their classmates. When Lila went to her first study group after dropping that extra class, three other kids in her engineering section said they’d also cut their credit load to manage anxiety. No one had talked about it before that, because everyone was too busy pretending everything was fine.
The answer to Lila’s original question isn’t a simple yes or no. It depends on what you call success. We used to talk about success as a 4.0 GPA, graduating on time, getting that top job right out of school. Now we define it as getting out of bed on the bad days, going to your classes even when you’re anxious, asking for help when you need it, and adjusting your plan when the original one doesn’t work. Lila’s GPA right now is a 3.2, not the 3.9 she had in high school. It’s good enough for any entry-level engineering job she wants, and it’s good enough for grad school if she decides she wants that. She still has bad weeks – last month she had a panic attack before a midterm and had to reschedule, and she spent three days in her apartment watching old sitcoms instead of going to lecture. That doesn’t mean she’s failing.
This weekend I’m driving up to see her. I’m packing her favorite chocolate chip cookies, the new wool socks she asked for, and I’m not going to push her to talk about finals if she doesn’t want to. We’ll probably go for a hike on the trail behind campus, get tacos from that same truck, and just hang out. We still don’t know how this will end. She might take a semester off next year if she needs it. She might transfer to a smaller program closer to home. She might graduate right on schedule, with that engineering degree she worked so hard for. None of those outcomes are failures. Right now, the answer to her question is yes. It’s possible. It’s just not the kind of success we used to imagine. And that’s more than enough.
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