Parent Question: Is It Possible to Succeed at a Demanding University While Struggling This Much?
Last Tuesday I woke up at 1:47 a.m. to the buzz of my phone under my pillow. The screen glowed with my daughter Lila’s name: Can I come home? I don’t think I can do this anymore. Lila’s a sophomore in the honors college at our state’s flagship university, a program she spent three years staying up late studying, editing essays, and obsessing over getting into. When we dropped her off freshman year, we were so proud we could barely speak. Eighteen months later, I was pulling on jeans and throwing a jacket in my car at 2:15 a.m., already calculating how long the 3-hour drive would take in the dark.
I stopped at her favorite donut shop just off the highway on the way up, got the old-fashioned lemon glaze she loves, and held it on the passenger seat to keep it from getting squashed. When I knocked on her dorm door at 6:30 a.m., she opened it in the same oversized hoodie she’s had since high school, eyes puffy, hair sticking up. Her desk was stacked three high with textbooks, a half-empty energy drink leaned against a crumpled midterm study guide, and a laundry basket full of dirty clothes sat in the corner unemptied. She didn’t even ask about the donut, just sat back down on her twin bed and pulled her knees to her chest.
“Everyone here acts like it’s easy,” she said. “They go out on Friday nights, they study for four hours and get A’s. I sit at my desk for eight hours and half the time I can’t even read the words because my brain feels like it’s wrapped in cotton. I missed a quiz last week because I stayed up till 3 panicking about this paper and slept through my alarm. My advisor said I just need better time management. Like I haven’t been trying to manage my time since I was 14.”
We walked around the empty campus quad as the sun came up, leaves crunching under our feet, and she kept repeating the question that’s been bouncing around my head ever since: Is this even possible? Can you actually succeed somewhere this hard when you’re struggling this much every single day?
I’ve had this conversation with five other parents in the last two months. All of us have kids who were the top of their high school classes, who checked every box to get into these competitive programs, who now call us crying in the middle of the week wondering if they’re cut out for it. The default answer you see everywhere is either “push through it, it gets better” or “if you’re struggling you should just transfer to an easier school.” Neither feels right to me.
What we ended up doing, step by step, wasn’t either of those things. First, we made an appointment with the campus disability resource center that same week. I went with Lila, even though she’s 20, because she was too drained to navigate the phone menus and paperwork. A lot of parents don’t know that even if you had an IEP or anxiety diagnosis in high school, you have to reapply for accommodations in college, but the process is a lot simpler than most people make it sound. We brought her old documentation, got a quick updated assessment from the campus counseling center, and walked out two weeks later with official accommodations: extended time on exams, permission to record lectures, and approval for a reduced course load this semester.
That reduced course load was the first big win. Most people don’t realize that to keep full-time status for financial aid, housing, and health insurance, most universities only require 12 credits, not the 15 most full-time students take. Dropping one 3-credit class cut her workload by 25% overnight, and it didn’t affect any of her benefits. That’s the kind of small adjustment no advisor mentions when they’re telling you to fix your time management.
Next, we emailed each of her three remaining professors ourselves. We didn’t ask for special favors or for them to cut her a break. We just introduced ourselves, explained she was working through ongoing anxiety, attached her accommodation letter, and asked if they could point out which assignments carried the most weight right now so she could prioritize. Two of the three wrote back the same day, one offered to meet with her weekly to go over lecture notes, and another dropped that missed quiz from her grade. That’s something else most people don’t talk about: professors at big demanding schools usually don’t want to see a student who’s working hard fail, they just don’t know what’s going on unless you tell them.
The last shift was the hardest: we had to change what we call “success.” For years, we all bought into the idea that success at this school meant graduating in four years with a high GPA, moving straight into a great job. We’re okay with it now if it takes her five and a half years, if she doesn’t graduate with honors, if she takes a semester off halfway through if she needs it. I have a nephew who graduated from MIT five years later than his original plan, after taking two semesters off to manage his depression, and he now has a job he likes, an apartment he likes, and he hasn’t had a full-on panic attack in two years. No one cares that he graduated late. No one even asks.
Right now, it’s still a work in progress. Lila still has bad days. She texted me last Wednesday at 9 p.m. saying she cried through half her study session and was sure she’d fail her midterm. She got a B- on that midterm, for what it’s worth. She still struggles to get out of bed some mornings, she still burns her microwave popcorn more often than not, she still calls me when she’s lonely on a Saturday night. But she’s still there. She went to a fall festival with her friends last weekend, she baked pumpkin bread in her dorm microwave and posted a photo of it on Instagram, she’s talking about applying for a research assistant position next semester with one of her professors.
Is she “succeeding”? It depends on what you count. She’s not hitting the markers we all thought she would three years ago. But she’s showing up for herself, even on the hard days. That’s more than enough for me right now. I don’t know what the end of this story looks like yet. But I can say this: it is possible. It just doesn’t look the way we all thought it would.
Please indicate: Thinking In Educating » Parent Question: Is It Possible to Succeed at a Demanding University While Struggling This Much