Autism Goes To College
Autism Goes To College
EPISODE 47: It's Back to School...at UCLA for Peri
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Peri begins her junior year at UCLA this fall quarter, and she's back to tell the story of her decision to transfer from a small liberal arts college in the northeast to a big public university much closer to home. UCLA is the most applied-to school in the country. So how did she do it? And why? In this episode, Peri talks about her decision to leave Hamilton, how it went taking classes at Santa Monica Community College for a couple of years, and how she chose four schools, all closer to home, as targets for her transfer. Peri discusses finding her strengths, overcoming struggles, and offers insights on what works for her as a student on the spectrum.
Do not take classes because you think you should take the classes. Economics and computer science. I took because I thought that it could help me in the professional world. And if it gives you an existential crisis about your identity as a scholar, and then that bleeds through to your other courses, including the ones you're actually passionate about, just drop it. Do not feel ashamed for dropping a class.
SPEAKER_03Having autism isn't something that should prevent people from having a successful college experience. It takes work.
SPEAKER_00Join clubs, find groups, find your people, find ways to fit in, see a peer mentor, see somebody who can help you get involved on campus.
SPEAKER_01There were a lot of black children on the spectrum who were also deaf. She's not the first one.
SPEAKER_06I researched all of the majors and I eliminated the ones that sounded not interesting to me. So then I changed it to chemical engineering to work with chemistry. Then I took an environmental science class and I'm like, I think environmental issues are really important, and I'm really passionate about state sustainability and stuff. So then I changed it to finally environmental engineering.
SPEAKER_04Especially in a college town like Don't DoorDash. Like, just go out and get the food. It's good exercise.
SPEAKER_05Hey everyone! Thanks for joining us on this episode of Autism Goes to College. The podcast for students on the spectrum and for everyone who supports us. Navigating college is always a challenge. So here are the hacks, insights, and great ideas you've been looking for to make college work for you. We're a small group of self-advocates. We're all in college or recently graduated, and you can do this too.
SPEAKER_07Autism Goes to College began as a documentary film following five college students on the spectrum as they navigated college life. At the end of this episode, I'll give you some details about where you can see the film today. And it's all at our website, autismgoes to college.org. Every month we drop a new episode. Here's what's also new: there's a resource center on our website with dozens of outtakes of important stuff that didn't quite make it into the film, all of the podcast episodes, and blogs from experts and from student advisors from the film. Thanks for listening. We do hope to hear from you. Hello, thank you for listening to our podcast, Autism Goes to College. It's Catherine, and I'm here with Perry Abrams, who is about to begin her first year studying at UCLA. She's coming into UCLA as a junior after she started out, as she told us on the podcast previously, at Hamilton College in upstate New York. If you are a longtime listener, you will remember Perry for her love of chocolate milk. There's a lot to catch up on since those years at Hamilton, though. So let's jump right into your story. Perry, thank you so much for coming back and being our back-to-school season opener. I think it's so wonderful and authentic when we have students come back on and catch us up on their college journey. It's been almost exactly three years since you spoke to us as you were entering your second year at Hamilton. What's happened since then?
SPEAKER_02How do you want to catch us up? Thank you so much for having me and allowing me to speak again on the podcast. I definitely have a lot to say. Enough material for maybe more than three years. So sometimes I listen to the podcast that I did and I feel nostalgic and I also feel sad because a lot of the preconceived notions and hopes I had going into my sophomore year at Hamilton didn't turn out the way I thought they would. You know, I went into Hamilton right after high school thinking I'm gonna be at this small liberal arts college with an open curriculum and a close-knit community, and I'm going to be there for four years and I'm gonna graduate and I'm gonna miraculously find out who I am and what I want to do with the rest of my life. And then the first semester of sophomore year is when I really realized um that I wasn't where I was supposed to be. But I was also very hesitant to let myself accept that truth. So I tried to bottle it all up, and I was not being truthful with myself. I was not being truthful with my family, and it was definitely possibly the hardest experience of my life.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, and I noticed that you talk about some magical thinking that was kind of going into the college process. And as an alumna of a liberal arts college, I understand sort of the charm of that Northeast beautiful campus and the small, cozy setting. You know, it feels like something out of a book. So what happened or what changed that brought you back home?
SPEAKER_02I think that I have to tell the story through details because the more I focus on the broad strokes, the more I get sucked into this. I've been in therapy for three years, deconstructing my experiences and learning how to reconstruct my identity as a scholar and as a person, because this experience caused almost the disillusion. I didn't know who I was anymore. I'd attached so much of my identity to being a good student and being smart because I thought that that was the one thing I had going for me. You know, I have difficulty in social situations and understanding the social cues around me. So I thought, well, I am good at school. That is who I am, that's what I have going for me. But then my mental health at Hamilton just spiraled and I was skipping classes and I wasn't turning in assignments, even though I knew that I could do them. It was just so hard for me to get out of bed and face the world because I felt so small and so alone, and I didn't want anyone to know how much I was struggling because I felt like this need that I needed to be independent, I needed to be an adult, whatever that means. And that's hard for me. I think that's hard for everyone. And these impossible standards I imposed on myself just caused the whole house of cards to crumble down.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. And as autistic scholars, we kind of are disadvantaged by this black and white thinking that either we're excelling or it's such an abominable failure that we have to hide it. But I don't want to interrupt your flow. So carry on. Then what happened?
SPEAKER_02There happened to be a person who went to my high school who shared an art history class with me. And during a class around before Halloween, so in October, she noticed that I was barely staying awake to pay attention to the um lecture because I was having trouble sleeping. I wasn't taking my medications. Sometimes I would go out at night and I would walk the campus at night. And I know that that was very dangerous, but I felt like I needed to be alive and feel something other than the nothingness that had engulfed me. So it was very dark time. And so the girl, my classmate, um, took me outside and said she noticed that maybe stuff wasn't okay. And she talked to me about the counseling center at campus, and she said that she uses it and that it's really helped her. And so I said, okay. And so I went there, and then everything spilled out of me because I was holding so much in and I really needed to release it. And that same day, um, I finally called my parents and I came clean to them about just how much I wasn't telling them. And my mom flew all the way from LA to upstate New York that day. And I was so surprised, and I really shouldn't have been, because I I knew intellectually how much she loves me, but I thought that once her and dad learned the truth, that they wouldn't care about me as much. Because I wasn't interacting with them and I wasn't reminding myself that, oh, I have a family that does love me for who I am.
SPEAKER_07So your your parents were so supportive as soon as you reached out, it sounds like, which is wonderful. And what did you do with that support in place?
SPEAKER_02Well, the immediate aftermath is kind of a haze. I remember I remember that it was near Halloween because the one thing that I was putting effort into was assembling all the pieces for a Halloween costume because that's what I normally do at that time of year. I love Halloween, and I guess I wanted something in my life to be normal.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, you have your your special interest, your hyper focus, your one life raft. I hear you. What was the costume, by the way?
SPEAKER_02I was like a 70s glam rock star. Oh, that's awesome. Okay. Not anyone in particular, just in general.
SPEAKER_07Just like hair, glam. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I remember the first happy memory I have after Hamilton is my dad, my sister, and I went to see Nightmare before Christmas at the Hollywood Bowl, and I'd put together my outfit, and it was so amazing. And I think that was the first time I forgot what had happened and just how my life was not progressing the way I thought I would. And my mom found me a therapist that I really like and who I'm still seeing now, and went through the like logistical process of taking a leave of absence from Hamilton and just giving me time to settle back into myself.
SPEAKER_07So initially it was a leave of absence from Hamilton, not a choice to withdraw and transfer. What changed then that made you decide to enroll in a very different school from Hamilton? Because UCLA is an incredibly competitive admission. How did that come about?
SPEAKER_02So I need to tell you that in between Hamilton and UCLA was Santa Monica College, and that was the transition, the transitional phase that lasted about two years. So in the spring of what would have been my sophomore year at Hamilton, I decided that I needed to prove to myself that I could succeed in an academic environment. And so I signed up for two classes at SMC with help from my parents. And I also signed up for an a weekend art class at Pierce College because I decided I wanted to find as much happiness as I could in my life. I also got a membership to the local yoga studio. That lasted about a year, but I have been doing more exercise since then and being more conscious about my health, what I'm putting in my body, how much I'm sleeping, um, and because everything contributes to mental health. You know, my mom always says, go back to basics.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. So you went back to basics at Santa Monica College, which is a community college. You were able to live at home, I'm assuming, while you were doing those courses and working on your well-being and your holistic health.
SPEAKER_02Yes. And I did so well in those two classes that the next, oh, I got two internships over that summer.
SPEAKER_07So you were showing yourself that you were still capable of success. Those first two courses went well. Were you like working on a concentration or the UC transfer pathway at that point?
SPEAKER_02Yes. I gotten myself into the scholars program at SMC, which has an amazing pathway to UCLA that increases my chances of missions substantially. And I needed to take a bunch of prerequisites in order to bolster my transcript to UCLA and decrease the amount of classes I would have to take there. So over the next four semesters, I took basically all of the general ed classes and all the lower division requirements for being an English major at UCLA. And I had many, many meetings with my scholars program counselor to talk about preparing for UCLA. And she was lovely. And I was always so proud of myself for being able to reach out and ask for help when I had questions. You know, there were times when I was got overwhelmed or unsure of myself, and I didn't turn in assignments, or I felt like I was regressing, but I was always able to get back up again.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. The reality is it it might feel like regression, but we generally don't struggle with things exactly one time and then never have that struggle again. So I'm glad that you felt supported. I imagine that during that time while you were in the scholars program at SMC, you were probably weighing the options between Hamilton and UCLA still. What was that process like for you?
SPEAKER_02So I forgot when exactly when in the timeline I decided I wasn't going back to Hamilton. Um I had many conversations about it with many people. I don't know. I just thought that a part of me wanted to change the story and like have a heroic comeback, like someone in a book. And another part of me knew that if I went back there, I would be haunted by the ghosts of just memories. And now I'm able to like look back and have fond memories of my time at Hamilton and all the things I liked about it. But at the time, the summer after sophomore year, I thought that if I went back, it might be detrimental to my mental health. And it's so far away from my family. I feel like that's the reason why I was struggling so much. It's because when you're far away from the people who love you and support you and you're not used to that independence, it's easy to lose accountability and it's easy to lose yourself in your feelings and not reach out to people. So I'm commuting to UCLA.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. So you had been living on campus at Hamilton. You said you want to stay as a commuter student now. So socially, when you came to Santa Monica College after Hamilton, did you get involved on campus? What was that like?
SPEAKER_02Unfortunately not. I mean, I do regret that, but for me, SMC was a place to go to to relearn how to be a student. And I mean, everyone was very nice at SMC. Um, so I don't have any complaints there, but it's just a lot to focus on when you're reassembling yourself. But I I was incredibly lucky that my therapist um and I were talking about other ways to be involved in social stuff. And she mentioned this place called the Miracle Project, which is a theater program. It's gone on for 20 years, um, basically for neurodivergent people and disabled people. And I signed up to volunteer at a summer workshop, and I absolutely loved it. It was like the happiest I was since returning from Hamilton. It was amazing. Whenever I had a hard time at school on Tuesdays, I knew I could go to the Miracle Project and I can just vent and turn it into like improv sketches and laugh, and it was amazing. I got accepted to company class where we make an original show to perform in May, and I did that for two years, and hopefully I'll be able to do it this year as well. I'm not sure how that will work with my busy, busy schedule, but it was super fun. I got to reconnect to the creative side of me that loves wordplay and theater and singing. And I even got some opportunities to speak about autism to inform people, and I got paid.
SPEAKER_07Paid speaking opportunities to educate people about the autistic experience is a great outcome. So it sounds like in a lot of ways you benefited from having community college be a place to work on those student skills and rebuild your confidence, and then having your social expression and your artistic expression be in other venues where you felt more understood.
SPEAKER_02You know, ever since Hamilton, I've really been reconnecting to the autism community a lot. I got an internship at um, if you know Danny Bowman from Love on the Spectrum or elsewhere, her animation company has had me as an intern a few summers ago, and then again this summer, and they're absolutely lovely. And I guess at Hamilton, I think I made too much of an effort to distance myself from the neurodivergent community and put on that mask and not embrace that part of my identity. But since going back, that's the place where I feel the most happy and comfortable. And I know that UCLA has an amazing neurodiverse collective.
SPEAKER_07Yes, yes, Bruin Neurodiversity Collective has collaborated with us. They helped us put on our uh live episode in April. That's where I found out about it. I was in the audience. Oh, yes, I remember seeing you now. Okay, yes. So there's lots of good stuff at UCLA, and I will say that the benefit of these larger campuses is that there are more students to bring together that neurodivergent-led student community. So when did you commit to UCLA? Like when did you know that that was the goal?
SPEAKER_02So I'd applied to four colleges throughout my time at SMC. Um, UCLA, LMU, Low Marymount University.
SPEAKER_07I've heard of that. It's that's a private school. That's a private school. Okay.
SPEAKER_02Um USC and Cal State University, Northridge. It's the closest Cal State to my house. I just applied to the places that were reachable by car. That was the one priority. But UCLA was at the top of my list because I know how prestigious it is and how many doors it could open for me, just the amazing alumni network and the mentorships that I could have there and the research opportunities and so on. And I knew that it was very, very hard to get into, but I had these other options. And I don't want to sound like I'm bragging, but I felt like I was in a dream when I realized I got into all four schools that I applied to.
SPEAKER_07Yeah, that's amazing. And a testament to the hard work that you did building yourself back up after your sophomore year at Hamilton. So when you were transferring, did you have to declare a major on your applications? Um, or did did you just know that you wanted to study English?
SPEAKER_02So, in order to get the benefits of increased admission chances through what was called the TAP program, I had to declare a major and I had to declare an alternate major. And so I chose English and then comparative literature, which is basically just English, but you study text translated from different languages all around the world. And I mean, I always knew that I wanted to do something with writing, creative writing. Um, I actually took two creative writing classes at SMC, which I'm so proud about, because one of the classes in sophomore year at Hamilton that really alerted me to how severe things were getting was creative writing. And when I wasn't excited about the thing that has been my passion since as far back as I could remember, like that really showed me just how much I needed a break. But with the creative writing classes at SMC, I really got to reconnect to that part of me. And I felt so happy and so blessed. Um I did a creative writing class for the winter, in they call it a winter intercession at SMC. And I happened to do part of it over Zoom at San Diego because we'd been evacuated from the fire in January. And God, I can't imagine what would have been if I had been at Hamilton while that was happening. And my dad had a heart surgery and I was around for the second one, but I missed the first one. And there's just so many things that have happened in my family that I would have missed otherwise if I'd been at Hamilton. And so I'm so glad that I'm so close to home and that I can just be surrounded by the people who I love and who have loved me since I was born, basically.
SPEAKER_07So what I hear you saying is don't undervalue the presence of your loved ones and your family in in your college selection because that's so important. Um, you know, I didn't want to go too far away. I was driving distance from my parents' house for college too. So I get that. You said that you took that creative writing course last winter. Did you feel like you had your creative juices back and that you it was feeling like you had recovered from that period of not having it?
SPEAKER_02One of the first things I did when I was at San Diego was I was spending splitting time between my aunt's house and then my. Cousin's house, and my cousin is way older than me, and she has a husband and two kids. And I was in my cousin's house, and there was a bunch of markers. And one of the first things that I felt like I had to do, I was kind of possessed by the urge to draw a Koran and marker painting of the fire. And I mean, I've been writing songs about the experience at Hamilton. I have feel like I've grown so much that I can actually reflect on it and turn it into artistic expression. And you know, I know it's a cliche that like suffering creates great art. And but yeah, reflecting on the experiences, including the ones that are dark and that you don't like to think about, can create great art. True.
SPEAKER_07I would love more great art with less suffering, though. Um, so we'll be releasing this episode right at the peak of back to school season for a lot of folks. Now that you have really had kind of the collegiate dark night of the soul and journeyed through it and come out the other side stronger than ever, do you have advice for other autistic or neurodivergent students that are taking on the back to college season? Tips, hacks, words of advice?
SPEAKER_02All right. Number one, get priority enrollment. It's very important. Try and make sure that you can enroll in courses as soon as you possibly can. I enrolled in July. Um, there was an entire day on campus dedicated to that, and I ended up with a schedule that was pretty much perfect. None of the classes started too early, none of them ended too late. They were spread out, so there wasn't, I wasn't like packed with schoolwork on one specific day. I even was able to make it so that Fridays were free. Oh, how wonderful. Yeah. And the logistics of a schedule are more important than you think. It determines how much energy you have day to day, how much time you have to do the work outside of class for school, and hopefully also other stuff that isn't school related.
SPEAKER_07Your sleep, your meals, everything is contingent on having the schedule that suits your body's rhythms. And I think as autistic individuals, we're very sensitive to needing our routine and our structure.
SPEAKER_02All right. Number two, do not take classes because you think you should take the classes. Two of the classes in sophomore year uh at Hamilton were creative writing and art history, classes I was genuinely excited and passionate about, and one of which, creative writing, would have been what my major was provisionally going to be. The other two were economics and computer science, which I took because I thought that it could help me in the professional world. Do not have that same logic when choosing classes.
SPEAKER_07Yeah. This the do not take classes out of a sense of duty because they will bore you and you will waste your effort and you will probably underperform.
SPEAKER_02Yes. And if you think anything like how I do and you don't understand economics, and it gives you an existential crisis about your identity as a scholar, and then that bleeds through to your other courses, including the ones you're actually passionate about. Just make sure that if you don't like a class, if you and sign up for a class and you realize I can't do this, um, drop it. Do not feel ashamed for dropping a class.
SPEAKER_07Don't don't be. I take syllabus week and visit multiple classes.
SPEAKER_02Number three, more advice. There's this one song called You Are Not a Robot by Marina and the Diamonds. I love that song. Yes. The advice is you are not a robot. You don't have to act perfect and polished and composed all the time. People will accept you and want to care about you and support you if you are vulnerable and honest about your story and the things that are going wrong with your life and the things that are going right with your life. You don't have to hold it on in. You don't have to make yourself an island in order to be seen as a successful adult or a successful human being. Because the truth is that nobody is a robot. Everyone is dealing with their own stuff. And everyone is unsure about their place in the world and the way that their future will turn out to be. So you're going to have a lot more in common with everyone than you think you do. You are not alone. And even if you are alone, there are people out there who will love and accept you.
unknownYeah.
SPEAKER_07Thank you so much, Perry. I'm so happy to have you back on. I hope UCLA has chocolate milk in the dining halls.
SPEAKER_02Well, if not, I can always get it at the Trader Joe's or whatever other store has dairy-free chocolate milk.
SPEAKER_07All right. Well, congratulations and best of luck. I think we'll land it there. Thank you. Thank you so much. And now, as promised, here are ways to see the documentary. The documentary film Autism Goes to College is currently available through many channels, but the easiest way to see it today is to rent it on Vimeo On Demand, which you can access from your Apple TV or most smart TVs by going on the Vimeo On Demand app. You can also find a direct link on our website at www.autismgoes to college.org. The film is also available for educational use and live and hybrid screening events. All the relevant info and links can be found on our website. Thank you so much for listening, following us on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok, and especially for adding your reviews on Apple Podcasts. Our show is specifically for students on the spectrum navigating college, and we really appreciate your support for Autism Goes to College. Thanks for listening.