I thought I was going to drop out of college at least 3 times in the four years I’ve been at UP. I obviously did not, but it’s been a very interesting four years in terms of my plan for my career.
It probably makes the most sense to start with a quick rundown of my pre-college educational experience. I was always a pretty smart kid overall, I excelled at reading and had a very large vocabulary, but I missed a lot of letter sounds when spelling and couldn’t do math for the life of me. I was diagnosed with ADHD and a specific learning disability in 5th grade but it was never followed up on for some reason so I never ended up with an IEP or 504 plan. I was also not told about my ADHD diagnosis. I did alright in most of my classes in high school but only because I spent the vast majority of my time working at the expense of other aspects of my life. Basically, I had no balance (I know, very healthy). As I said, I did alright in MOST classes. I scraped by with Ds in all my math classes, but hey, Ds get degrees right?
I lived in California at the time and was determined to go to college out of state , which meant I needed to get scholarship money somehow. I was in pretty good shape from playing softball for most of high school and saw that if I ran fast enough, I could get a ROTC scholarship. Apparently, I did, and I was able to get enough money to go out of state and come to UP. I applied as a psychology major, and within a month of starting, switched to political science and then a week later switched, again, to physics (a very good choice for someone who is clinically bad a math). My GPA for my first year was awful and I ended up losing my scholarship and wasn’t able to continue the ROTC program. So… I had to get it together or else I wouldn’t be able to attend UP anymore. I had a bit of a crisis between my first and second semesters and decided I wanted to switch to elementary education because I’ve always loved working with kids and wanted to provide the support I didn’t have growing up to young students.
And then, as soon as I had officially switched my major, COVID hit and I once again considered dropping out. But that wasn’t really an option so I had no choice but to figure out how to manage online school on my own. That didn’t go particularly well either. I was incredibly burnt out and struggled to get work done on time. However, I did end up getting (re)diagnosed with ADHD and found out that I was as a kid, which didn’t actually help my academics, but it did help me give myself some grace. I was once again worried that I was going to fail and have to stop attending, but I had no idea what I would want to do without a degree so that wasn’t an option. I was able to keep my grades up even though online school was a bit of a disaster and I was exhausted.
I knew with my student teaching year coming up that I needed to get better at managing my time and energy and advocating for myself. I started to let my professors know what things I might need help with ahead of time. I made sure I got explicit instructions and examples if anything was unclear to me and didn’t shy aware from asking for extensions if necessary. As I get further into the edTPA process, it’s going to be more important than ever for me to ask questions, even if it seems like an annoying amount, learn how to allocate my energy, and learn to organize my work. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be graduating this year with my teaching license ready to be a positive adult figure in kids’ lives and give them the support I didn’t have at that age 🙂
Rachel, A very thoughtful post. You tell a powerful story in a well written essay. The gifs provide some levity to make it great read. I also want to congratulate you on your ability to reflect and grow from it. That’s a super power!