Video is here: Sarah – Autism and Uni | QMU

Section 1: Intro to transition to university

Hello, my name’s Sarah Haywood. I use the pronouns ’she’ and ’her’ and I’m a lecturer in the arts therapies team here at Queen Margaret University.  I want to spend a bit of time thinking with you about transitions, which I find absolutely fascinating and, as an autistic person, sometimes quite challenging.   What is a transition? Well, in its simplest form it’s a change. It might involve a change of place, of state, or a change from one way of being to another. When we make a transition, we cross a psychological and maybe also a physical threshold from one thing into something else.

We make lots of transitions each and every day. So when I wake up in the morning, I transition from being a person who’s asleep to being a person who’s awake. Then I have to make a transition from being a person who’s in bed to a person who’s out of bed. From being a person who’s not in the shower to being a person who’s in the shower, and so on. We make lots of these transitions in our day-to-day lives and when we’re feeling energised and well-resourced we might not even notice them happening.

Some transitions are bigger and feel a lot more significant. They probably take more energy and effort to navigate. Going to university is a really good example, especially if it also involves changing where we live.  One idea that I find useful is that a transition is not just about a change in the external world. It’s also about the internal process that has to happen to help us move from one state, one way of being, to another.

So every transition that we make has an emotional component, and that can be tiring. Even if the new thing – the thing we are transitioning into – is something we’re looking forward to, like going to university, it can be effortful to navigate the practical and emotional aspects of a significant change.

I didn’t know that I was autistic when I went to university, either for undergraduate study or postgraduate study. Now that I understand myself as an autistic person, I’ve learned some helpful things about transitions and my relationship with them that I hope might be useful for you too, and I’ll share these in the next couple of videos.

Sections 2: Coming to university

If you’re watching this film, there’s a good chance that you or someone you care about who’s autistic is thinking about going to university for the first time.  And that’s a big transition!  It’s really doable. I’ve done it as an autistic person. Lots of autistic people have done it, and managed it really well, but you may find that you need more support than a non-autistic person might do. Support can come from other people, from services and organisations, and of course there is also the support that you can offer to yourself. For example, giving yourself plenty of time and space to think well in advance about how to prepare for the transition into university. What do you already know about yourself in relation to transitions, and how might that self-awareness help you prepare for coming to university?

We know that some autistic people find any transition pretty challenging, and going to university really is a big one because there are actually lots of different transitions wrapped up inside it. It also involves a lot of new things, and that can create a really uncomfortable feeling of uncertainty.

If you’re changing your living arrangements to go to university, for example moving into new accommodation, that’s a big deal. You’ll be getting to know a new sensory environment at university, figuring out how to find your way around and where you need to be, as well as meeting lots of new people – other students as well as university staff. If your programme of study involves placements, then getting to know these other new environments and even just getting to the placement itself can be a big transition to navigate.

Your usual routines, and the strategies that you’ve been using up to now might need to be adjusted in the university environment. There are also going to be different kinds of demands when you come to university. Probably the most important one is related to independent learning. At university you have much more control over how and when and what you learn. That can be really exciting and hopefully very engaging, and maybe also a bit daunting, because you will probably have to make more choices and decisions about your learning than you’ve done previously. You’ll be expected to be more self-directed than you might have been at school, for example – and we know that for some autistic people, making decisions and getting ourselves organised can be pretty big challenges.

It might be useful to start preparing for the transition now by thinking about what helps you top up your batteries when life is costing you a lot of energy. What supports and resources do you find helpful when things get challenging? You don’t have to figure this out all by yourself – maybe there’s a trusted person like a friend, family member, teacher or mentor who could support you to think about this.

However you get yourself ready for it, it’s probably helpful to be aware that the transition to university might really demand a lot from you, practically and emotionally, and it might feel like your batteries need a lot of topping up during this process. So don’t be surprised or worried if you experience this important transition as a big deal, maybe bigger than you were expecting and with quite a range of feelings involved. It’s okay to feel that way – you’re not doing it wrong! And there will be people at university who want to help you.

Section 3: Anatomy of transition

Whenever we experience a change, the transition itself has a number of different aspects to it.  There’s the getting ready for the transition – anticipating it. There’s the actual transition itself – experiencing a change – and afterwards there’s often a process of absorbing or recovering from the transition that we’ve just made. Each of us will experience transitions in our own way, and there might be some aspects that we find more difficult than others. For example I know for me that it’s often the anticipation of the transition that is the most challenging thing. Actually making a transition when I get there – crossing the threshold into the new thing or the new state of affairs – is often not as hard as I thought it was going to be. Another autistic person might feel differently; the run-up to the transition might feel pretty straightforward, but actually propelling themselves over the threshold into a new situation is pretty tough.

Whatever it is that we personally find most demanding, we know that transitions really can ask a lot of us in terms of our emotions, our thinking, and our problem-solving skills.  Coming to university for the first time is the most obvious big transition that we make when we enter higher education.  But there are lots of other, smaller transitions that we’ll encounter at university, such as getting from one class to another. Transitioning from your morning sessions into the lunch break, or from the lunch break into your afternoon classes. Transitioning from home into learning, and from studying into relaxing. Transitioning from being with lots of people to being alone, or from the working week into the weekend. Transitioning from one semester to another, and from one year of your programme into the next.

Here at Queen Margaret University we aim to help autistic students navigate these transitions and figure out what supports might be useful for each person. Your personal academic tutor, or PAT, our disability advisors, wellbeing service and the QMU autism mentors may all be able to help. We won’t get everything right but we want to try to help!