Sorry this is a very, very long rant and I just want to get it off my chest. I've had to leave some details of my courses vague.
I've been doing graduate studies in a particular research group for 1 and a half years and I'm doing my second course. The first one went really well - my average was a lot better than that for my undergraduate degree. I haven't yet disclosed to my supervisor about my ASD for a variety of reasons. This course is supposed to be a longer version of the course I did last year, so I figured it would be the same with a bigger research project. As last year's project went so well without my supervisor being aware of my ASD, I figured not telling him would be unnecessary.
As some of my requirements for this course overlapped with ones from the previous, I was able to get permission to use up a couple of spaces in my subject enrolment to finish off a small course I was doing alongside my undergraduate degree which I discontinued to start my first graduate course. I wasn't a good student during undergrad - between my executive disfunction, family problems and realising I had an ASD and getting a diagnosis, my grades suffered a lot and I barely scraped into grad school. Everyone else in my research group are all high-acheivers who don't really understand what it's like to have to redeem themselves academically so I'm the odd one out.
As my research component of the previous course scored much higher than the coursework, I figured I'd get all of the coursework out of the way in the first year so I can maximise the time available for the project and the thesis. Last semester I did mostly coursework and I had to spend most of my lab time reading through a lot of literature for my new project and writing a literature review. Once I was back to just research I had lots of delays due to errors resulting from software glitches that no one would have reasonably expected to me to know about (group made software for which I don't have access to the source code) as well as congestion in the computer servers. For the most part the delays were out of my control and continued well into this semester.
This semester I have just one coursework subject, for the course I discontinued in undergrad. I've actually spent almost all of my time on research and only recently I've managed to get something to my supervisor that he was actually happy with. While last year everything was relatively clear - he'd suggest things, I'd do as much as possible and he generally accepted them, this year he's been really critical of most things I submit but really vague on what he actually wants. So what happens is that I do something and then only find out in the following meeting what he actually wanted in the first place.
In the week after I managed the "actually submitting what he wanted because he actually made it clear for once" week, a couple of events were on at campus which I got involved to de-stress. I got as much done as possible before I participated in the events and a couple of the things I didn't get done were things that would realistically take more than 2 weeks to do (I had to pull all-nighters and late nighters to get just one of them done and the other started in the two weeks following). At the meeting he was incredibly disappointed in what I didn't do, especially those two things. He then asked what I did that week. I was tired from one of the events and I didn't want him to know that I didn't spend the entire week doing research. Suggesting that two of the tasks he set were far too big for a week's worth of work didn't occur to me. Instead I mentioned that I had an assignment for the subject (which I actually didn't). He then told me that I had to quit either the subject or the project, and as I was really tired I really couldn't think of anything to do but agree to quit the subject. No further research work as discussed.
I don't want to quit the subject because it's a minor part of my overall workload - I'm doing ok in it with minimal effort. Dropping it at this stage would result in an automatic failure, which has larger ramifications at graduate level and would totally destroy the track record of passed subjects I have as a graduate student. When I started doing graduate studies I vowed to never fail a subject again for any reason and so far I've done it. This is also the final subject in the course I dropped out of as an undergrad and being able to finally go back to finish this course was one of my main motivating factors last year. It's just a subject to him but it's a lot more than that to me.
The next week I submitted some work towards the two major things he asked for the previous week and also asked for some help with some of the aspects in the things I submitted before the meeting. On the advice of a more senior student in the group, if I submitted enough work he could theoretically forget about the whole dropping the subject issue. However when I turned up all he did was ask me whether I dropped the subject or not, which I didn't. Nothing else was discussed. I also had a family member die suddenly earlier that week and a sibling hospitalised so it was incredibly upsetting to turn up to the meeting instead of staying with my sibling, just to get that from him. I then met with my counsellor, who then suggested disclosing to him if things didn't get better as the main issues were caused by or made worse by my ASD and were common to most graduate students with an ASD that she sees (she's with the university's counselling service but she tends to see mainly those on campus with ASDs).
Before I could do that he blocked access to stuff that I needed for my research claiming something about needing to re-evaluate my research plan before I could go back to using them. Which completely prevented me from working on one of the two main things he wanted as well as other tasks that I needed to do. Luckily I was able to still do the other thing but that was sheer luck as I had what I needed to do the rest without access to the things he blocked. That led me to go to my disability officer on campus, who helped me update the relevant details. The officer even emailed a copy of my disability statement to him and his copy details so my supervisor could talk to him about the ramifications of my ASD. The officer promised to reply once my supervisor replied to him. It's been a week, so far nothing. At the meeting in between my supervisor just wanted to know about whether I dropped the subject, nothing about the main task I completed, the other work I did (which completed everything I could do which didn't require access to the things he blocked) or even a mention of getting something from my disability officer.
I have no idea whether he has actually read the email with the disability statement or not either as it was sent to his university email account which I know he doesn't read as often as his general one. Even if he did he may not even react favourably to it as I know he clashes with a staff member rumoured to be on the spectrum and it may taint his perception of ASDs.
I'm meeting with him again tomorrow and the stress is really getting to me. If this continues I might actually fail the subject outright anyway from spending even less time on it to do more research work and dealing with my family's recent trauma. I'm worried that this whole problem and the emotional stress from my dead family member and sick sibling will cause a meltdown and that I will do and say things that I will regret.
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Peace of mind, you ran away from me, so make me lose my mask of sanity...
14 Oct 2014, 6:43 am
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