Earning a PhD with ADHD
By: Meagan Lauber
Edited by: Beverly Setzer & Marianne Chapleau
For most people, receiving a diagnosis is usually not a positive experience. But for me, being diagnosed with ADHD at age 19 was a huge relief. I finally felt like I had answers and validation for almost 2 decades of self-doubt and struggling. Up to that point, my intelligence had felt like a paradox: I was smart enough to have been placed in a gifted STEM program at age 8 and to easily excel in my science, history, and language classes. But when it came to math, my brain took more practice to get the hang of keeping all the numbers, rules, and symbols straight.
It didn’t help my confidence that the only explanation my teachers could think of as to why I was doing well in my other classes was that these mistakes were ‘careless’ which I couldn’t help but internalize meant I as a person was ‘careless.’
So to keep up with my peers and the expectations of me as a ‘gifted’ kid, I had to work harder. If the material didn’t make sense to me during class, I went home and taught myself at a pace I could handle. At 10, I got in the habit of scheduling out my weeks like the best of corporate millennials would. Despite my best organizational efforts, occasionally a homework assignment or important date would slip my mind, and I would be met with intense self-loathing for being so ‘careless’ as to have forgotten.
I didn’t realize it then, but out of necessity I was developing coping skills to help my neurodivergent brain function in a neurotypical world. Another impactful part of getting diagnosed was then reading scientific literature about and personal testimonies from adult women with ADHD. Article after article, it felt like reading a vignette of my own life. Knowing I wasn’t alone, but rather was the poster girl for ADHD in adult women, was both comforting and deeply troubling that so many women out there were experiencing the same struggle.
Like a lot of other women with ADHD, my symptoms are very entangled with anxiety.
In fact, most women with ADHD are initially diagnosed with a mood disorder around adolescence, only to have their ADHD identified later in adulthood. This is because the diagnostic criteria in the DSM-V disproportionately look for symptoms of male phenotype ADHD, such as hyperactivity and impulsivity, which are more outward and visible expressions that have come to be seen as ‘typical’ ADHD traits.
However, equally as common but less overt symptoms like inattentiveness and internalization characteristic of the female ADHD phenotype are often missed. These women are then usually with a mood disorder, which many developed as a secondary response to coping with undiagnosed ADHD for the majority of their childhood.
This was certainly the case for me. I can’t say for certain that with appropriate and timely diagnosis of my ADHD that I wouldn’t have anxiety at all, but I can point to many moments in my life where I felt like a failure due to some aspect of the disorder and the resulting shame made me hyper vigilant and anxious to not to ever make the same mistake, or any mistakes at all lest I should give myself away as incompetent. But the thing about anxiety is it’s not rational and being constantly hyper vigilant only serves to stress you out and then make you feel like an absolute failure if you ever slip up. This hyper vigilance against failure is a dual edged sword though. When I have trouble focusing, I start to get very anxious about not being able to focus which in turn makes it even harder to concentrate.
Because of my experience as a woman with ADHD, I have faced several challenges, both before getting my diagnosis and then afterwards when trying to receive accommodations. The first major was challenge was internal, as I grew up with a warped perception of my intelligence and possible career trajectories.
I grew up assuming I was bad at math because it took me more time than my peers to pick up the concepts, and I was always the last kid to finish tests. This, coupled with my natural affinity for language and literature fostered the false belief that my brain was better suited for language and humanities rather than math and science, further affirmed by well-intentioned family members saying it was ok because “girls are better at that anyway.” I had always loved science, but this self-perception was the reason I entered college as a B.A. instead of a B.S., as I didn’t think I was capable enough to handle advanced math requirements for the B.S. degree. However, once diagnosed I was empowered with the knowledge that I wasn’t inherently bad at math, but rather that I had been coping with an undiagnosed learning disorder. Armed with proper treatment and new coping strategies, I switched to a B.S. and got all A’s in my STEM classes.
While the diagnoses helped give me more confidence to pursue my interests in STEM, overcoming internal obstacles was only half of the battle. I still faced systemic barriers unique to neurodivergent women. Before entering graduate school, I was unsuccessful several times in requesting extra time on the math section of the GRE. The testing service is incredibly strict with what they consider to be sufficient proof of ADHD. Despite having been diagnosed and treated for ADHD throughout college and getting documentation from my psychiatrist, I was not allowed to get extra time on the GRE because I did not have ADHD documentation from early childhood. With most women not receiving their ADHD diagnosis until adulthood, this arcane rule represents yet another indivisible barrier to women pursuing STEM graduate education that simply doesn’t exist for men with ADHD. Thankfully, despite these sexist rules, my math scores were decent enough considering the fact that I could only make it through 2/3 of the problems before time was up.
Luckily, I was accepted into a fantastic PhD program without perfect GRE scores and was able to pursue my passion for neuroscience. Despite this outcome, the experience was deeply disheartening for me as I had put in so much effort to maintain perfect grades in undergraduate in order to get into graduate school. The value of 4 years of my hard work was being devalued by a test score that reflected societal sex discrimination far more than my true capabilities. I also couldn’t help but wonder about other women with ADHD hoping to pursue graduate education whose dreams had been crushed by this policy. Especially considering that for some graduate programs GRE test scores can make the difference between how much funding a student receives or if they receive any aid at all.
Though I delt with several challenges in my journey to pursue graduate school, I felt confident that earning a PhD was something I could succeed in due to my tenacious attitude. However, in my first year, I often worried if I belonged in academia in general and more specifically in science. The perception of science is that it's infallible and exact, so I assumed scientists as people have to be perfect and never make any mistakes, which is definitely not how I would describe myself. But no person, no matter how smart, is immune to mistakes entirely. I’m learning that what makes a great scientist isn’t their ability to never make mistakes, but their ability to learn and grow from the mistakes when they happen.
Being neurodivergent, the most important factors to me when choosing a PhD program were finding a program with a strong community feel and support systems in place for its graduate students. It was also important for me that the graduate community I ended up in be diverse and inclusive, where students and mentors encourage collaboration rather than competition. That’s why the Graduate Program for Neuroscience at Boston University was my top choice and I have only been further impressed by the community and support since starting!
Still, the hardest part of my first year was dealing with my old friend, imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome with ADHD is extra insidious because there it represents a concrete thing you can point to within yourself and feel ashamed of when a perceived failure happens, like not getting into the lab you wanted to join or when you don’t do well on an assessment. Additionally, due to our vastly different academic backgrounds, it seemed like all my peers were so much more knowledgeable in neuroscience than I was. All of this compounded the imposter syndrome I felt and made me question if I belonged in the program or in science in general.
In addition to feeling less than my peers, I don’t personally deal well with turbulence and uncertainty, which are the two words I would use to describe the first semester of my PhD. Having to learn to let go and accept the uncertainty has been a challenge, but I’m hoping that it will better prepare me for future turbulent situations in the future.
If you are someone struggling with ADHD or anxiety, please don’t feel less than others because your brain works differently. I’ve realized that in some situations it is actually advantageous, and so you need to recognize that being different isn't a bad thing. For example, my ADHD gives me added cognitive flexibility as I’m able to pivot and go in a different direction with new ideas without getting hung up on old ones, and this can be a great quality to have in an interdisciplinary field like neuroscience.
If you’re wondering what you can do to support students with ADHD in the future, the most important accommodation is to understand and appreciate the fact that every student (neurodivergent or not) learns in a different way and that these these different learning needs and styles can be accommodated. For me, one of the biggest helps is having extra time on exams. Sometimes, I need more time to mentally access the problem and tease it apart before trying to work it out and solve it. Having an artificial time constraint, like taking a timed test, massively exacerbates my anxiety and then I can’t focus on anything but the fact that time is running out!
At the end of the day, the best way to support your peers or students with ADHD or anxiety, is to recognize that every student learns and works at a different pace and that not everybody gets everything perfect all the first time.