Is It Possible to Succeed at a Competitive University While Struggling With Learning or Mental Health Challenges?
The rain was coming down in cold, sideways sheets when I pulled up to the train station last November, waiting for my daughter Lila to come home from her first semester at the state’s flagship honors college. She dragged her overstuffed duffel across the curb, misstepped, and dropped the whole thing straight into a puddle. Before I could even get out of the car to help, she leaned against the passenger door and started sobbing, her shoulders shaking so hard I could see it through the rain-streaked window.
I drove us straight to the drive-thru for her favorite greasy cheeseburgers and fries, and she told me between bites what had been building for two months. She’d started having panic attacks before every exam, pulled four all-nighters in three weeks, failed her first general chemistry quiz, and stopped going to her weekly anxiety therapy appointment back home because it conflicted with her 2 PM biology lab. “Everyone else here just gets it,” she said, picking at a loose thread on her hoodie. “They go to parties after class, they get A’s without trying, and I’m over here struggling just to get out of bed some mornings. Is it even possible to make it here when I’m struggling this much?”
I didn’t have an answer for her right then. I’d spent the year before she graduated high school celebrating her acceptance, scrolling through the university’s Instagram page full of happy students at football games and research internships, and I’d bought the line that if you work hard enough, you can handle anything a top school throws at you. I’d also heard the stories: the neighbor’s kid who dropped out of the same honors program after first semester, the cousin’s daughter who transferred to a local community college after a year of constant panic. I sat there in the drive-thru line, fries getting cold in the bag, and felt that tight, scared feeling in my chest that every parent gets when you realize your kid is hurting and you don’t know how to fix it.
Over the next two weeks, we worked through it step by step, and what I learned surprised me. A lot of people act like the only two options are to tough it out and graduate on time or quit and transfer somewhere easier. That’s not true, and there are small, concrete changes that make a huge difference that most people don’t talk about.
First, we called the university’s accessibility services office, not just her academic advisor. I didn’t know this before, but even if you had 504 accommodations all through high school, you have to reapply for them at college, and most kids and parents forget this step until they’re already drowning. We got Lila’s documentation from her high school therapist, sent it in, and within a week she had two new accommodations: extended time on all exams, and permission to take tests in a small quiet room instead of the 300-person lecture hall where everyone’s crinkling wrappers and shifting seats. That one change cut her pre-test panic attacks by more than half, she told me later.
Next, we sat down with her advisor to look at her credit load. Lila was taking 16 credits that semester, because she’d bought into the idea that you need 15 credits a semester to graduate in four years. Turns out, at her school, 12 credits is still considered full-time, and her merit scholarship only required full-time enrollment, not a specific number of credits per semester. She dropped one general ed course that she didn’t even need for her psychology major, and picked it up in a low-stress online summer session at our local community college that transferred over easily. That freed up 10 hours a week of her time, enough to sleep and keep a consistent therapy appointment.
Instead of going back to the off-campus therapist she saw in high school, she switched to the free first-year anxiety support group at the university’s counseling center. It meets at 7 PM on Sundays, right after the campus dinner rush, so it doesn’t conflict with any classes, and she said half the kids there are in the same boat: honors students who are struggling to keep up, embarrassed to tell their friends or families that it’s harder than they expected.
I’ve changed the question I ask her when she calls, too. Instead of opening with “How are your grades going?” I now start with “What’s one thing that’s taking more energy than it should this week?” It’s a small shift, but it gets her talking about the actual problems instead of shutting down because she thinks I’m only going to judge her for a bad quiz grade. Last week she told me her chemistry professor’s office hours are at 8 AM, right when her other class starts, so we helped her email the professor to ask for a 15-minute slot after class one day a week, and he said yes.
It’s not all fixed. Lila still has bad weeks. Last month she called me at 10 PM crying because she messed up a lab report and thought she’d fail the class. She still talks sometimes about transferring to the smaller regional college 45 minutes from home, where the classes are smaller and the pace is slower. She hasn’t gotten a 4.0, and she’s going to graduate in four and a half years instead of four, which is fine with us.
Is it possible to succeed at a demanding university when you’re struggling this much? The answer I’ve landed on is yes, but it doesn’t look like the success you see on college recruitment brochures or student Instagram feeds. It doesn’t mean no bad days, no crying, no adjusting your plans to fit your needs. It means one week at a time, small changes that add up, and redefining what success even means. Right now, Lila’s still there, she’s passing all her classes, she goes for walks with her roommate on weekends, and she still comes home for our dog’s birthday every spring. That’s enough for us, and it counts as success.
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