I remember this sort of thing

We once had a donation at college of those overruns in the student centre, where they can't sell the books, so they cut the covers. They were mostly Penguin classics. I gathered up so many that I couldn't really carry them well, and I filled up a couple of bags plus more (they're small, but still). I was late for my next class. My professor actually helped me carry them to my car. Afterwards, I went back and picked through what was left and found quite a few more. I was a history and classics major, so these were right up my alley, things like Scipio and Herodotus, Descartes, etc., but also some esoteric subjects like understanding tarot as well. I wound up with about 100 of them. I still have them. It was so worth it, even with damaged covers.

Now I will say, when I got home, a friend looked through them and asked to pick one or two for himself and my greedy pigginess got threatened (hey, I didn't share well back then; I'm an only child and I'd worked hard at getting them home). He'd missed out on the whole thing. He got mad and decided I should be buried with the 'imperative books' or, in my case, cremated with them. Since he's in charge of my funeral, he may just do it, despite my advance planning, and the thought of him burning books in a crematorium does bother me. He'll know which ones are which due to the covers, too.

Sigh.

Hmmm....

I was looking at a list of autistic traits, and I'd never thought of doodling as autistic 'stimming'. I did this all through school. I didn't need to really do notes back then, or at least didn't think I did, and did well enough on exams; this belief was underscored. Given that later I took notes for our Cthulhu game, initially for myself (I didn't know it would be for posterity and for the group, and that I'd be doing it 34 years later), my notes from then would suck. Those early notes are full of doodles, but little content, and of course I remember little of the stories, and I've gone back and looked at the modules, but our game master does so much improvision and modification there was no way to get the notes right, and most of the people who played are gone on to other things and are unavailable. I have tried to reconstruct them, trust me. But when I was younger and unmedicated, and therefore my memory was less impaired, I did actually remember more of my classes, and there was structure, and I comprehended most of what I heard, plus I was pretty much bored because I'd read the assignment and many of the lectures were just out of the book, so in my boredom I drew doodles in the margins and took few actual notes. It worked for me at the time. I got A's and occasional B's in secondary school and early college. Things started to unravel once I started to have a social life, and I lost the structure that I'd had in high school in school in college. I still did okay, but let's just say I only made the dean's list my freshman year. I needed to start taking notes, but if anything, I just doodled more, because it was a way to soothe my anxiety.

Also, two of the things they list that are missed in girls a lot are twirling hair and biting nails. Also me. My mom had to get this bitter stuff to put on my nails. I'm surprised my hair didn't break off, too.

PS For the last 15 years, for the game I've used a digital voice recorder that plugs into a USB-B slot into a computer and transfers a file so I can then listen and write up what happened; not so much a verbatim transcript but the gist in story form. My phone will do an AI transcript, but that actually takes longer to turn into story form than listening, believe it or not, because there have been a couple of times I've run out of batteries and I've had to use it as backup.

This was hilarious--and so true!

The Truth About College And Getting A Job. This Is Perfect.

I'm very happy for this young woman--she has remarkable drive

Standout BCTC graduate snags prestigious $120,000 scholarship to continue her education

Ebony Nava has been a standout at Bluegrass Community and Technical College, a straight A science major who headed student government, wrote for the school newspaper and won nearly every academic award offered — all while raising her son and her six siblings.

Nava, 26, graduated from BCTC last year and will graduate again Saturday, this time with a certificate in biotechnology and a $120,000 scholarship to continue at a four-year school.

The Jack Kent Cooke Scholarship is given to 90 community college students a year from all over the country. For now, Nava is thinking about attending Wellesley College in Massachusetts with a double major in biochemistry and philosophy

.....

Nava, who lives in Georgetown with her family, credits many in her community there and at BCTC for her ascent. When she gained custody of her siblings at age 20, she had a second-grade education but quickly earned her GED before entering BCTC.

Flying without a safety net

For Poor, Leap to College Often Ends in a Hard Fall

Angelica Gonzales marched through high school in Goth armor — black boots, chains and cargo pants — but undermined her pose of alienation with a place on the honor roll. She nicknamed herself after a metal band and vowed to become the first in her family to earn a college degree.

“I don’t want to work at Walmart” like her mother, she wrote to a school counselor.

Weekends and summers were devoted to a college-readiness program, where her best friends, Melissa O’Neal and Bianca Gonzalez, shared her drive to “get off the island” — escape the prospect of dead-end lives in luckless Galveston. Melissa, an eighth-grade valedictorian, seethed over her mother’s boyfriends and drinking, and Bianca’s bubbly innocence hid the trauma of her father’s death. They stuck together so much that a tutor called them the “triplets.”

Low-income strivers face uphill climbs, especially at Ball High School, where a third of the girls’ class failed to graduate on schedule. But by the time the triplets donned mortarboards in the class of 2008, their story seemed to validate the promise of education as the great equalizer.

Wow, I got all sorts of hits on this...at least I didn't major in psychology

Because apparently that is the kiss of death as far as getting a job....

The 11 Majors with the Highest Unemployment
History (albeit US--I was strictly European), library science, and linguistics are all on the list (I do not technically have a linguistics major, but I was one class short.)

I am apparently anathema should I be on the market again. Ugh.

Thanks to Vanessa Irvin Morris for the link!

I started out a science geek

I took college-level chemistry in high school, including organic (over the summer). I came three points short in by-passing the first two semesters of college chemistry, plus lab, and started out my college career in a dual biology and sociology major, interested in oecology and how people interact with their environment.

I had soaked up all that chemistry, physics, biology, and even had survived calculus, when I realised I was terribly burnt out on science. Then my animal biology lab teacher chloroformed a white rat we'd been playing with all semester in front of me and dissected it.

The next semester, I switched to history and sociology. I'm not saying history was easier--it's more than memorising dates, you know, but it was less intense, less full of ups and downs. And I found it much more interesting than I did the practice of science, which when you get down to it can be tedious, repetitive, and really, with the burn out I'd lost the spark I'd had for it. Instead, I threw myself into studying people--their history, their languages, art, etc. I went on to get a degree in history, sociology, and honours (a Great Books programme), went back and added a classical civilisation major and a Judaic studies minor, and then spent years in the ancient and mediaeval history graduate programme. Granted, I'm not working in that, I'm working as a librarian, which benefits from all sorts of backgrounds. :)

I do still love science--much like I love technology--but I prefer to be an armchair scientist, rather than making it my life's work. But I did find this interesting:

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It’s Just So Darn Hard)

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

For educators, the big question is how to keep the momentum being built in the lower grades from dissipating once the students get to college.

Maybe this will encourage mental health programmes

1 in 5 young Americans has personality disorder: Fewer than 25 percent of college-age suffers get treatment, study finds

Almost one in five young American adults has a personality disorder that interferes with everyday life, and even more abuse alcohol or drugs, researchers reported Monday in the most extensive study of its kind.

The article also mentions that '[a]ccording to the National Institute of Mental Health, an estimated 1 in four U.S. adults suffers from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.'

The study also looked at anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, and other non-personality disorders. Personality disorders are especially difficult to treat, because they are complex.

College counseling programmes need to really work at reaching those in need. Also, since those 18-25 tend to work in lower-paying jobs, it is also important that programmes be made available to young people outside of colleges who may no longer be on their parents' insurance and otherwise could not afford treatment. Let's face it--psychiatric treatment is expensive, even with insurance. If you meet a counselor every other week even with a $10 co-pay, that's $260 a year, plus the cost of medications. Without insurance it would be more like $75-150 a session. Treatment of the young is also important because untreated mental disorders tend to worsen as we age, plus this is a time when students and others are establishing themselves in terms of education and career.

I am fortunate to have access to decent health care--but even I struggle with medical costs. This coming year my co-pays have doubled, so I'm having about $3000 taken out of my pay for my flexible spending account. Much of that has to do with mental health. That's about 13% of my salary at the two jobs. I wish I'd had access to it when I was younger--if I had been treated for my various issues at an earlier age I might have succeeded in getting a PhD in mediaeval history like I planned. My anxiety at doing the oral exam/thesis defence was so great, but I didn't realise how bad it was until I was put on medication once it was too late to use my credits for the degree. I have a mix of illnesses that really make my life difficult sometimes, but treatment has helped immensely. My anxiety, social phobia, and obsessive-compulsive disorder are much improved. I'm also had a year-long intensive group dialectical behaviour therapy for borderline personality disorder and am on medicine for bipolar II disorder. Throw in medicine for attention-deficit disorder, too, although I don't know if the researchers in this study would consider that a mental disorder. I still have a lot to deal with in terms of childhood issues and other topics for counseling, but my brain chemistry is much better. :) Anyway, you can see I have a personal perspective on this issue.

(I know, I sound absolutely crazy if you go by my diagnoses. But hey, I'm what they call 'medically managed', and I'm working and paying taxes and all that, plus I'm not living on the street. Yet, anyway. I know I've had some close calls on that front. My point is there's a stigma attached to mental illness, but people being treated can lead productive lives. It's when they go off their medicine or stop counseling that they tend to go off the deep end before they know it.)