Personal Growth/Life Experience in College and AS

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It is common wisdom that college is a time for people to gain life experience and to grow as a person; people are thought to develop a more complex, mature perspective on themselves, their friends and family, their community, and the world as a whole.My hypothesis is that people with Asperger's syndrome are significantly less likely to have these kinds of experiences than the general population because:

• We usually lack sufficient social skills to embroider ourselves into a network of friends and acquaintances
• The social encounters we do have are still mostly of the rejecting/ostracizing/closing-off kind
• We retreat into our minds under such duress

hmm, well I just completed my first year of college. It was very hard especially going to a hard school. All aspies will have different experiances(just like NTs) due to being different people and well different circumstances. For me, college really helped to open my eyes to so many things and it did give me a lot of growth as a person, so far. As for socialization goes, I struggled but I would've struggled a lot more if it hadnt been for one good friend I met in a program before college. After following him around a lot helped to expose me to more people so in a way I was lucky. Yeah I closed myself off from a lot of people but I learned sorta how to improve that. If I hadnt flown 2000 miles away to college my social life wouldve likely been dead and my view of the world wouldve been more narrow mainly becuase all the instate colleges suck and people here are can kinda stuck in the island life aspect(i live in hawaii). So I needed to go away, it wasnt even an option.

I understand how for some, leaving their family can be rather isolating. For me, I never had much connection with my family in the first place, except my mom. I had lost contact with those few friends from highschool so I was very much needed to move onto the next stage of my life and work to establish some friendships and build my social life in another place.

I know what you mean. When I was in college I lived in a dorm for a semester and felt very lost and intimidated so I hid in my dorm a lot. I did not have a room mate because the college I went to wasn't that crowded. I might have been better off with a dorm mate even though at the time the thought of that scared me.

I had a suite mate though but I didn't see her too much plus she was always singing gospel songs with her awful, yowling vocal style and that drove me crazy. This one woman who lived in the dorms told me she sounded like cats mating when she sang. I laughed. Other than that the suite mate (we shared the bathroom, both had our own dormroom) was fine.

I can understand everyone who has had the overload experience with loud rowdy neighbors always making noise and how it practically puts them over the edge. The constant noise left me in a tightly wound, bad, irritable mood all the time so I just shut up, stopped talking, stopped looking at people and moped my way through that semester of college. I dreaded the noise of the dorm so much I drove back home and spent most of my time there, where I could control all noise, instead of in my dorm room.

Next school year, I didn't return. Instead I went to another college elsewhere another disaster worthy of another post in another thread elsewhere.

I think I had a lousy college experience. I didn't do too bad academically though. Just overwhelmed by how many people there were and certain ones trying to get too familiar made me nervous too.

I just finished my first year of college. I made no attempts whatsoever to make any friends all year, simply because I felt I wouldn't fit in with other people my age. I feel even more isolated and different from mainstream society than ever before at the moment.

College sunk me in a huge depression, and despite what most NTs thought, it wasn't because of the academics. Too bad noone ever understood me; also, too bad I never had the communicational skills to make myself understood.

Most of the things I learned in college, by the way, were wasted, because I ended up with a job where I don't do anything related to anything I learned in college. Oh, and my social skills. They didn't improve; they went down. The main thing I got out of college was a bunch of negative memories of bitter social encounters that I'm still dwelling on.

I can totally relate, had a similar bad eperience. And yet, compared to the rest of the stages of my life, college was the best by far. It's all relative. Marriage, working in offices, extended family relations, friends...all were even worse experiences.

Crap. And I'm starting in two weeks.
Scared as hell. Any advice?

I lived with my parents while I was in college. I never considered living in a dorm or with someone I didn't know.

I enjoyed college, but I didn't make any friends. I didn't exchange telephone numbers with anyone and had only two occasions where I did something outside of school with people I went to school with (a party and a dance club, both disasters). I did have some acquaintances from my classes I would speak with at school (in the computer lab, in a study area for the math department, etc.) but these conversations usually involved classwork.

I usually ate alone, studied alone and exerted effort trying to look like I wasn't alone.

College was a positive experience because, by my third college, I found academic success which brought a lot of self confidence. Otherwise, I can't say that I had positive life experiences or grew as a person. If you take away the academics, college was an empty experience.

Anyone have any real good college experiences? Please?
If not I should stop reading right now cause it is just depressing me.
I finished my associates degree at a community college and found it to be a pretty empty experience.
I am hoping that living on campus at a 4year uni will be better.