How to Get Through a University Semester with ADHD

In the first two weeks of the semester everyone is motivated. The notebooks are new, the calendar is empty, the sentence "this semester I will be organized" is very convincing. Then the sixth week comes, the homework of three courses falls on the same day, and nobody remembers the date of the first midterm exam.

For someone with ADHD this pattern hits harder than in high school. Because in high school there was at least the day, the bell and the teacher. At university the structure is pulled away and the difficulty underneath is left exposed. The parts of getting through a semester from start to finish are these: the work of the first week, the calendar, attendance, talking to the professor, the note system, the slump after the midterm, and the support units. I go in order.

For a more general study framework you can look at how to study as a student with ADHD; here I look only at university and the scale of a semester. On this topic there are few controlled intervention studies with university students with ADHD. Most of what I write consists of suggestions derived from general learning principles and from what is known about how ADHD works. I will point out where it is weak.

What changes at university

A review of university students with ADHD collects reports that these students have a lower grade point average than their peers, a higher rate of leaving courses and more academic difficulty (DuPaul et al., 2009). This is not fate. But it shows that the starting point is not equal.

The difference from high school comes together in three places. First, your weekly class hours go down but the time left to you goes up, and nobody structures this time. Second, exam and deadline dates are far away and few in number; in many courses the grade comes out of two exams and one assignment. This creates an environment that makes you feel that "what is not urgent is not important". In my view the ADHD mind reads urgency not from the date but from nearness. Third, there is nobody to remind you. The professor says the assignment once, and after that everyone is on their own.

All of these load onto skills called executive functions, such as planning, starting and the sense of time. As Barkley describes it, ADHD is a weakness in the capacity of these functions to link the future to present behaviour (Barkley, 2015). The structure of a semester demands exactly this capacity. For a more general framework there is the article on ADHD at school and university.

A short note from my own past. I studied law, and I studied philosophy at METU (Middle East Technical University). In both I left assignments to the last night but I did them. At the scale of a single assignment this looks like a method. At the scale of a semester, that is, when the last nights of five courses pile into the same week, this method does not hold. Most of the suggestions in this article are there to make that squeeze visible in advance.

When choosing courses

The load of a semester is decided before the first week, when choosing courses. It is tempting to take as many courses as the credit limit allows, but in ADHD the limit is not the number on paper, it is the number of walls falling in the same week.

When choosing courses it helps to look at how they are assessed. If in a semester all five courses are graded by a single midterm and a single final, the semester turns into two big races. An assessment spread out over assignments, projects and short quizzes scatters the load across time. In ADHD the second is often easier to carry, because urgency comes more often. But project-heavy courses also have group work and long deadlines; so I am not favouring either side, I suggest balancing so that there is some of both in a semester.

An eight o'clock morning class is a separate risk for someone whose sleep schedule already slips late. I explained in my article on sleep why staying up late is so common in ADHD. If you can choose between sections, picking the hour you will not miss often gives a better result than the "the course is good but it is early in the morning" choice.

If you study at a school with an add-and-drop week, it is possible to use this week as a second chance. After the first two weeks, having seen the syllabi, the load and your own capacity, dropping or swapping a course is much cheaper than dropping it mid-semester. Let me remind you that rules and deadlines change from institution to institution; you need to look at your own academic calendar.

The first two weeks: the semester map

The best investment of the semester is half a day of work done in the first two weeks. Taking the syllabus of each course (the course description form, the syllabus; its name changes from institution to institution) and moving it onto a single page.

For each course I pull out the following:

• Exam dates and the weight of each in the grade
• Assignment and project deadlines
• The attendance requirement
• The professor's office hours and email address
• The main source and where the slides are shared
• The make-up exam and excuse exam rules

This information is scattered across the syllabus and is mostly said in the first class and never mentioned again. When it all goes onto one page, you see the real shape of the semester for the first time: in certain weeks the walls pile on top of each other.

It is also useful to turn the page into something that hangs on a wall. A map sitting in a closed folder becomes a map that is not used. Taking a photo and putting it on the phone's home screen can also be tried. The important thing is that the map stays in a visible place all semester and is looked at once at the start of the week and once at the end of the week; this look needs to be tied to a fixed time, as in the article on the weekly review.

Setting up the calendar backwards

After making the map I do two things. First I read the calendar in reverse: from the midterm date, three weeks back, a "by this date I should have started revising" point. Same for deadlines: pieces of work counting backwards from the deadline. I wrote the details in the article on deadlines; the essence is that we always underestimate the last ten percent of a job, and so putting a "should be finished" date before the finish date.

Then I mark the clash weeks. If there are two midterms or one midterm and one deadline within a week, the week approaching it becomes a "preparation week". So as not to try to learn a new topic in the clash week, I start two weeks earlier.

A rough planning example: the midterm is on 28 November. On 7 November I draw up the topic list. By 14 November I complete the missing notes. Between 14 and 25 November, revision and problem solving, spread out with gaps. In the last three days, nothing new. These dates are an example; what matters is that it is written backwards. I worked out the hours of the last week before the exam day by day in the article on the last week before the exam.

Spacing out revision and testing yourself is one of the most solid findings of learning research (Dunlosky et al., 2013). Most of these findings were obtained with university students without ADHD. I did not see a separate comparison in students with ADHD. But testing yourself instead of reading the book once more is a method that makes it harder for attention to drift, so it may provide an extra advantage in ADHD; this is an inference.

The weekly rhythm

The scale of a semester collapses in two places: when there is no weekly rhythm and when there is a gap after the class day.

For the weekly rhythm, a few fixed moments are enough. Sunday evening, twenty minutes: look at the map, what is due during the week, which courses have reading. On class days, fifteen minutes after leaving class: open today's notes, write in three sentences what you learned, mark the place you did not understand. These fifteen minutes sound small, but this is what reduces learning from zero three weeks before the exam.

The following is the skeleton of a sample week; it changes from person to person.

Day	What is done
Monday-Friday, after class	15 minutes of note wrap-up
Tuesday and Thursday evening	A 45-60 minute course block, reading or homework
Friday	Closing the week: what is left, mark it on the map
Saturday	Free, or a 90-minute catch-up block for what fell behind
Sunday evening	20 minutes looking at the coming week

This skeleton is not a full calendar; the gaps are left on purpose. In ADHD what makes a plan collapse is usually not making too little plan, it is making too much. When all-or-nothing thinking steps in, one faltering day invalidates the whole week's plan. The gaps are there for this.

Attendance: counting your allowance

Absence is a problem that quietly builds up in a university student with ADHD. On a day you cannot get up in the morning you miss the class, you do not go to the next one out of shame because you do not know what was covered, and the shame feeds the next absence.

What works here is writing down the attendance requirement of each course at the start of the semester. At most universities a certain attendance rate is required in theory courses and this rate is usually written in the regulation, but the rate can vary from course to course and institution to institution. Look at your own regulation and the syllabus of each course, and take the exact number from there. Then write the number of absences that are "your right" on the map page. This calculation, when you miss a day, gives you data instead of panic: "I have three allowances in this course, I used one."

Instead of ignoring your absence allowance for the whole semester, using it deliberately is also an option. Catching up on the topic of the day you missed from a friend's notes or from the course material within the same week is much cheaper than an accumulated gap. If twenty minutes are set aside for this on the evening of the day you missed class or the next morning, the loss does not grow.

Talking to the professor: when, how

Talking before the problem grows is always easier than talking after it has grown. In ADHD we do the opposite: as the problem grows, avoidance grows, and knocking on the professor's door gets harder.

I think there are three moments. The first, the first two weeks of the semester; while there is no problem yet, introducing yourself at office hours. The second, when something goes wrong at the first deadline or the first exam, within a few days. The third, the moment you notice the structure does not suit you, for example asking for staged submission for a single big final assignment.

You do not have to say your ADHD diagnosis. If you want an official accommodation, going through the disability unit is safer than leaving it to the whim of each professor; I describe that route below. The conversation with the professor, on the other hand, can be built on a concrete request. The following is a sample email draft:

Hello professor, could I talk with you for ten minutes during your office hours about [this assignment] in [course name]? While planning the deadline I find it hard to break a big job into stages. Would it be possible for me to set short dates for the intermediate steps of the assignment, or I would like to go over with you once whether these steps are suitable.

In this email there is no diagnosis, no apology, no long explanation. There is a clear question for the professor. In my view a student who asks early is met with more understanding than a student who never writes and turns up on the deadline day. This is not a research finding, and it varies from professor to professor.

If you cannot write the email, going to office hours and asking the question face to face may be easier.

The note system

The details of this topic are in the article on taking notes; here I write only what is needed for the semester routine. One place for each course: a notebook or a single folder on the computer. A hundred scattered different files turn into a "which note was for which course" search on the last night before the exam.

If slides are shared before class, downloading them and writing notes on them is lighter work than writing from zero. When listening and writing at the same time is hard during class, marking the key concepts and filling in the details in fifteen minutes after class is a solution. If you are going to record audio, ask the professor for permission first; some classes are not suitable for recording, and recording without permission can cause problems both ethically and under the rules.

There is also a tendency to reinvent the note system every semester. A new notebook, a new app, a new colour system. Changing the system mid-semester can turn into a new form of procrastination; so choosing at the start of the semester and leaving it the same all semester is better.

Group projects

Group projects strain ADHD at two extremes: either you fall behind, or out of shame you take everything on yourself. I wrote about this topic in detail in the article on group assignments. From the point of view of the semester plan I add only this: write the group project on the map like the other deadlines, with its intermediate dates. Dividing the work in writing at the first meeting, putting an intermediate date on everyone's share and leaving this as a message to the group shrinks the grey area between "I'm doing it" and "I forgot".

The post-midterm slump

There is a silent collapse in the middle of the semester: midterm week ends, you breathe, and two weeks later you look and you are neither following the lectures nor doing the homework. There is no research on this specific to ADHD; I describe it as a frequently observed pattern, I am not claiming anything certain.

My guesses about the causes are these. The midterm was a goal, the goal has passed, the next goal (the final) is very far away and does not generate urgency. If midterm week was spent with over-stimulation and short sleep, tiredness comes out. If the grades came out low, shame and the wish to drop the course come out. I do not know which applies to you, but experiencing both at once is also possible.

A small plan written in advance for the first two weeks after the midterm works. I suggest three things. First, on the day the midterm ends, that evening, to write the smallest version for the next two weeks (fifteen minutes after class and two course blocks a week). Second, to go to the professor's office hours, see the exam paper and learn where you lost points. Third, to reopen the semester map and count the weeks left until the final.

If the grades came out lower than you expected, this needs to be treated as a decision moment. In the middle of the semester the decision "I'm failing this course, should I drop it or carry on" is often made that day with emotions. Letting a decision made with emotion wait a day, talking to the academic advisor or the disability unit and then deciding is, I think, better. At most universities there is the possibility of withdrawing from or dropping a course; the rules vary from institution to institution and there are deadlines.

Final period and the make-up exam

Finals are different from midterms: the scope is wider, the weight is higher and often more than one course falls in the same week. Here the backwards planning on the semester map works best, because you have seen the date of the final on the map since the first week. Three weeks before final week the "revision start" should be marked, and one week before the "nothing new" rule should be set.

The make-up exam is a second chance if you fail a course, but putting it in place of the first chance is risky. Not preparing for the final by counting on the make-up builds up the next semester and anxiety. Knowing it as a safety net and trying not to use it seems more reasonable to me. The rules (who can take it, how the grade is calculated) change from university to university; looking at your regulation is a must.

I gave the day-by-day plan for final week itself in a separate article.

Support: whom, for what, when

At universities in Turkey the disability unit is the main address where you can request accommodations in course and exam processes. How it works, which documents are asked for and what is discussed for ADHD I described in the article on the disability unit at university. One important thing about this unit: asking for the accommodation at the start of the semester is much easier and more effective than asking in the week before the final. For the general framework of exam accommodations you can look at the article on exam accommodations in ADHD; the accommodations in ÖSYM's (the Measuring, Selection and Placement Center) central exams and those inside the university run through separate channels.

Besides the unit there are three more addresses. The academic advisor, for course selection, withdrawing from courses and your grade situation. At most universities the counselling unit, for things like anxiety, motivation and symptoms of depression. And your own doctor, for medication or treatment questions; instead of changing your medication on your own in the middle of exam period, you need to talk to the doctor.

The shared problem in all of these is that starting is hard. Knocking on the door of a unit is a task in itself. That is why keeping the first step small works: find the unit's email address, write the one sentence "I would like to make an appointment", send it. The rest is talked about at the appointment.

What I take from this

For someone with ADHD at university, a semester is something less structured than in high school and therefore needing more structure. If nobody is going to bring the structure from outside, you need to build it yourself. It sounds tiring but the work is actually spread over a few fixed moments: the map work of the first two weeks, twenty minutes a week, fifteen minutes after class, a small plan for the first two weeks after the midterm.

I think what works best is to stop trying to fit yourself into a "good student" mould and to draw the real shape of the semester. In a calendar where the last nights of five courses fall in the same week, saying "I will not leave it to the last night" is not enough. Drawing the map and seeing that week three weeks ahead is enough.

I see asking for support as a tactic. The disability unit, the professor's office hours, the advisor, these are there to be used. Most of us call on them in the last week of the semester, when things have gotten very bad. If you can call in the first two weeks of the semester, I think that is the single highest-return move.