I’m Going To Quit University

Instead, I will enroll at the only state-maintained German distance teaching extramural university, starting next autumn. The idea was actually proposed to me by my mother and sister, because my sister is considering doing the same, and they thought it might make studying easier for me. I also discussed this with my husband, and slept over it, so while this was a relatively sudden decision, it’s not a rash one.

Arguments in favour of the change:

• You study online and out of books. Apart from the written tests, there are only two weekends during the entire Bachelor’s programme where you have to attend a seminar in person – and one of the study centres where you can do so is easily accessible to me, even without a car. Since I waste about 75 % of my energy in class on fighting off depression and only the remaining 25 % on taking notes or studying, I believe I will actually be able to study more effectively that way. You receive the materials and literature lists via mail, and you send in your homework and term papers online. There also are video streams of lectures and special software programmes for learning. At any time, you can contact qualified docents if you need additional help, and should you need to see someone face to face, you can also visit the study centres.
• It’s cheaper than a regular uni. Money is always a factor for me. And you pay for the classes you take only, not a fixed sum regardless of whether you actually take any classes at all. So, if shit hits the fan and I have to take a sabbatical (which I hope never happens, but we are talking eventualities here) again, I don’t have to pay just for staying enrolled in the programme.
• It’s more time flexible. I can adjust the learning to my personal schedule, because nobody cares whether I study something on Tuesday morning or Thursday afternoon or Sunday night, as long as I send in my homework punctually.
• Academically, it’s worth just as much as a degree from a regular uni.

Arguments against the change:

• I’ll not have a semester ticket for public transportation anymore. But: With the money I’m saving every semester on fees, I can buy a good number of tram tickets if needed…
• It sets me back to square one. But: I only took 6 hours per week last semester, and the next one would have been the same – I might actually be able to take more classes than that and thus eventually make up for “lost” time.
• They have a limited offer of subjects you can study only. And geosciences is not one of them. That is, in the end, the only heavy argument against it, in my opinion – and the reason why I never thought about making this step before. It would mean changing my major again. But: You can study psychology with them, and that is something I would be really interested in.

In the end, I believe the scale tips in favour of going ahead and doing this, because there are also arguments which fall outside of the pro-and-con-scheme listed above. The days of fantasizing about becoming a world-famous archaeologist are long over, and I don’t see myself crawling through the Andes or Alps, looking for rare minerals, either. What I want above everything else is to finally have some kind of degree and become employable; I’ll happily work as a secretary or a boring office job afterwards. The pipe dreams of glory are firmly buried.

And there are some obstacles in my current university course which did not occur to me when I had to make a quick decision in August 2011, and which I pushed into a remote corner of my mind afterwards: field trips abroad. I can’t do them – it would be ok if I got my own private hotel room at the end of the day, but going abroad and sharing a cabin with people who are essentially strangers for two weeks horrifies me to no end. I have worked really hard on my social phobia, but that is a problem I don’t think can be “treated out of my system”. On top of that, you also have to pay for those trips and all the equipment needed for it in addition to the semester fee, which runs up sums of several hundreds of euros every time, and I just cannot afford that.
Finally, seeing how the current semester ends on Sunday, I could actually apply for welfare myself instead of hoping some cryptic system where I take over from my husband works out – I haven’t been able to pay for the next semester yet, so all it needs is a phone call that I won’t be returning and I’m out.

Maybe it makes me look fickle in the eyes of some, but over the course of the last three semesters I realized that most of my problems with uni stem from the system itself, and I genuinely believe that my mental health would profit both from taking a break until October and even more so from getting out of that system. I love learning and writing papers and all of that, and I want to focus on this instead of how to effectively hold back tears in a classroom.

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Cognitive Deficits

Looks like I came down again for good – no further euthymic phases during the last 48 hours. Which does not mean that I’m doing poorly; quite the opposite. My legs hurt earlier, but I managed to relax them and went for a long walk outside.

Yesterday, I borrowed a text-book for students of psychology from the library, because I want to understand what’s going on better. My therapist always explains everything to me, but if I asked every question which pops up in my mind in between, we’d never actually get to work on my problems.
I’ve always collected as much information as possible about topics that are on my mind a lot, but only now I find myself actually able to do it. Just a few weeks ago, I still lacked the ability to concentrate sufficiently, not to mention the energy. If there is a drop of regret, it is that I was not able to chronicle the whole therapy properly due to those reasons; I’ll have to depend on my unreliable memory for that.

Cognitive deficits are among the most scary symptoms of depression. It is one thing to lie on the sofa without moving for hours on end, and an entirely matter if suddenly you cannot remember facts you usually knew, if your memory gets clouded and you cannot carry on the most simple conversation without frantically searching for words. My brain always had been the one part of my body that I could count on, and suddenly that started to fall apart. More and more often, I would feel like having a wall of opaque glass in my head – I could still tell there was something behind it, but there was no way to access it.
There were days when I was scared about this, especially in the beginning – if your grandmother has Alzheimer’s, that can make you worry quite a bit. Later I had started to accept this state as a given, but still mourned the lost capacities. I could hardly believe it when not too long ago the first cracks appeared in the glass wall, and ever since the impairment has slowly started to crumble away.
Before starting therapy, I had tests done at the hospital where I did not perform too badly, but sitting through exam-like tasks is different from losing personal retention, because on the former you get concrete feedback immediately, but the latter you do not notice immediately. You only know that the recollection of an event, for example, is gone if someone else mentions it and you cannot recall it at all, or if you are asked to name certain situations and draw a blank when searching through your memory for it.
In the very first therapy session, we did an anamnesis of my depression history and I actually had to look through old diaries to get this right, because in my head it was a huge jumble at best. Five months later, this has become a lot easier; I have access to a lot of memories again that were temporarily lost.