Finishing my post grad

[Eligiu]

I had to take a leave of absence for a year last year from my Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice due to autistic burnout and poor mental health (severe anxiety) and I realised last week that if I am to complete the course in the required timeframe I need to enroll for the next semester coming.

You have to complete the GDLP within around 3 years (give or take a semester) of starting it. After 5 years you have to start it again. I have disablity payments and I'm allowed to study part time on the DSP so long as the study load is under 30 hours a week, which to the best of my knowledge is a 3 unit course (10-15 hours) and a 25% course load.

So I re-enrolled and then realised there was a problem. One of the courses I need to still do was a 6 unit course when I started the GDLP last year which would mean if I did it I would lose my payments. I also don't think I can handle a 6 unit course either to be honest, not with my current load of work, therapy, and support worker help.

So I called the programme manager and she remembered me from last year and asked how things were going. I filled her in, then asked about how many hours the course was. Then she tells me, at the start of this year they actually split that course into two 3 unit courses! Jesus fucking Christ I am so lucky. Sure, I'll be finishing a semester later than I planned but she also said I only have to do the coursework and witness examination for that course as I've already done all the other practical stuff through my degree beforehand and my legal placement I did last year.

On top of that, she said that they will push back all the due dates for all my assignments for every course to give me more time to do them. I'm absolutely stunned at how accommodating the Law Society in my city is helping me be able to complete this in my own time at my own rate.

I'd basically given up on ever completing my GDLP because the thought of doing the courses back to back made me so anxious about failing that I figured I wouldn't even bother anymore. Being able to do one course per semester is totally achievable and I also don't risk losing my payments that I need as it comes under the threshold.

This is the best news I've gotten in ages. I'm actually excited to go back and study at my own pace now and slowly just get it done and achieve my goal of being admitted as a lawyer then I won't need disability payments anymore.

 

[JoshLobbs]

Burnout is a bitch, especially if you think your going to fail. I wish colleges and uni's had like monthly progress reports. It would help so much with anxiety imo.

I'm happy for you that you will be able to finish that course.

 

[Eligiu]

Burnout is a bitch, especially if you think your going to fail. I wish colleges and uni's had like monthly progress reports. It would help so much with anxiety imo.

I'm happy for you that you will be able to finish that course.

Thankfully I made it through the last course I did last year before I applied for a leave of absence and passed (the courses in the GDLP are pass/fail only so there's no need to worry about marks) and then I just spent whatever remaining energy I had focussing on getting my government funding for my disabilities and my disability pension to ease the financial pressure off a bit.

I put in far too much work to give up on this dream even now. The Law Society are, as I've said, very accommodating. Last year at the start of summer school I was just at the tail end of a 3 month long manic episode and I'd been to see my GP and get put on mood stabilisers and Quetiapine to abort the mania but I realised after I got an email from the Criminal Law Practice course coordinator that I had not done the pre assessment task. Oh no. My stupid manic brain had completely missed this deadline due to focussing on other shit. And my old access plan (which allows students with disabilities to ask for extensions) was only valid for my undergrad law degree, not the post grad. And I didn't have an appointment with my disability advisor for a month.

So I called the programme manager for the GDLP, the woman who runs the whole programme and just explained to her exactly the situation I was in and what was going on and she gave me a 5 day extension on the spot with no paperwork needed.

She also helped me with an incident when a seminar leader forced all us students to handwrite our notes, but I can't because I have a tremor and it makes my writing illegible often. So I just sat there rocking in the chair because I was so anxious then becoming self conscious because people were looking at me all because this seminar leader didn't consider invisible disabilities and the fact that some students learn better by typing their notes (she firmly believed that students retain knowledge better by handwriting. Not much help for me if I don't have pen and paper to take notes now is it?)

We had a meeting and I was able to bring up the reasons I felt like I was treated poorly because she basically put me in a situation where I couldn't learn or I had to explain my disability in front of the entire class which isn't appropriate. The result was that I got an apology, that seminar leader will now allow students to use laptops, and I got to have a private zoom session with another seminar leader to go over the content again so I could learn it properly.

Part of the reason I complained about that (seeing as I left the class early after giving up trying to just memorise what she was teaching) is because my brother is dyslexic and he would never be able to take notes with a pen and paper and dyslexia isn't rare. I wanted to make sure no student in that womans class ever felt like I did.

And that's why I want to get my post grad, and do disability advocacy.

 

[Floyd Martin]

I had to take a leave of absence for a year last year from my Graduate Diploma of Legal Practice due to autistic burnout and poor mental health (severe anxiety) and I realised last week that if I am to complete the course in the required timeframe I need to enroll for the next semester coming.

You have to complete the GDLP within around 3 years (give or take a semester) of starting it. After 5 years you have to start it again. I have disablity payments and I'm allowed to study part time on the DSP so long as the study load is under 30 hours a week, which to the best of my knowledge is a 3 unit course (10-15 hours) and a 25% course load.

So I re-enrolled and then realised there was a problem. One of the courses I need to still do was a 6 unit course when I started the GDLP last year which would mean if I did it I would lose my payments. I also don't think I can handle a 6 unit course either to be honest, not with my current load of work, therapy, and support worker help.

So I called the programme manager and she remembered me from last year and asked how things were going. I filled her in, then asked about how many hours the course was. Then she tells me, at the start of this year they actually split that course into two 3 unit courses! Jesus fucking Christ I am so lucky. Sure, I'll be finishing a semester later than I planned but she also said I only have to do the coursework and witness examination for that course as I've already done all the other practical stuff through my degree beforehand and my legal placement I did last year.

On top of that, she said that they will push back all the due dates for all my assignments for every course to give me more time to do them. I'm absolutely stunned at how accommodating the Law Society in my city is helping me be able to complete this in my own time at my own rate.

I'd basically given up on ever completing my GDLP because the thought of doing the courses back to back made me so anxious about failing that I figured I wouldn't even bother anymore. Being able to do one course per semester is totally achievable and I also don't risk losing my payments that I need as it comes under the threshold.

This is the best news I've gotten in ages. I'm actually excited to go back and study at my own pace now and slowly just get it done and achieve my goal of being admitted as a lawyer then I won't need disability payments anymore.

Education must be of high quality and this is an absolute axiom that we must adhere to absolutely precisely. Yesterday, before going to bed, I went to https://writingbros.com/essay-examples/stem-education/ and read important information about stem education and its role in the development of our education as a whole.

I congratulate you, this is really cool.

 

[Eligiu]

I congratulate you, this is really cool.

Thankyou. I just really think 5 years of difficult study which I achieved while addicted to IV meth and heroin and a lot of codeine for 2016-2017, cough syrup, weed and alcohol for most of 2018, a mostly sober 2019, poppy seed tea in 2020 and still managing to graduate with a 5.5 GPA out of 7 is too much effort to waste.

These last courses are pass/fail so I'm not actually graded at all. It's just a simple competency assessment. And the courses are intensive, so basically I might have a week during the whole semester where I go to 2-3 6 hour classes and that's all the classes for the whole semester then I just have 3-5 assignments to do for the course. Usually the assignments are split into one or two pre course assessments, then topic based assessments and a final practical assessment.

It's going to be weird going back after this break but I'm hoping I will manage it okay. Especially now that I'm finally on Dexamphetamine as well, I told my psychiatrist I suspected I had ADHD in 2017 but because I was still actively using meth/just stopping my use she 'parked' it for a while because to be very fair, it absolutely would have seemed like drug seeking. But after I got my autism diagnosis and I got swapped to dexamphetamine for narcolepsy, she asked me how the Dex made me feel and she said the way I described it sounded like an adult with ADHD who had just taken stimulant medication for the first time in their life. I then rementioned how meth has always affected me in a slightly weird way (makes me chatty but mellow, not tweaked out or sketchy) and I seem to have a naturally much higher natural tolerance to the substance than is normal. At that stage she provisionally diagnosed me then properly did, then we got the mandatory second opinion I needed due to my substance abuse and now I have access to other stimulant medication as needed. Studying with unmedicated ADHD was nightmare fuel material. I breezed through high school because it was so easy I never had to do any work. Then I got to uni and it was like a different world. My psychiatrist told me that people normally have big red flags for ADHD in transition stages of education, like grade school to high school, or high school to university. Mine was the latter.