 Hello everybody, welcome back to another video with me, Thomas Henley, on Asperger's growth YouTube channel. The thing that you're on right now, watch me. Hi. Today we're going to be talking about how to get support at university. This is going out to anybody who is on the spectrum or has any sort of mental health difficulties. I'm going to tell you about the best ways to go about getting support at university both academically and in your personal life. I'm going to cover how you can get disability support, how you can build a relationship both with your personal advisor and with your support officer which is going to be your main point of contact for times when you are struggling at university, struggling with revising and then I'm also going to touch on how to submit mitigating circumstances which is the document that you put in, you give some evidence for and it helps the university decide what grade they're going to give you based on the circumstances that you're facing at university. Hey, so let's get into the first point, disability services. When you sign up to go to a university they'll often ask you if you have any disabilities that you want to state. It's a good idea to state your disabilities when you go to university. It's not going to affect you in any sort of negative way if you do this because once you put down that you have a disability you have priority over who knows in the academic world. Sure the support office and the disability service will know about it but the people that you're around, the people that teach you will not necessarily know about it unless you give them sort of the green light to tell these people. They'll usually give you a sort of form when you come to university, you'll put down that you have some form of disability, some classified form of disability and they'll give you a few emails about their disability service. I recommend that you try and get that sorted out as soon as possible. Maybe get to university maybe one or two weeks beforehand, go to these assessments and pitch what you think will help you in university life. This can be anything from setting up counselling appointments to giving you some extra time in exams but also to give you some rest breaks if you need it during your exams as well and to give you a bit more leniency in the the deadlines for coursework. One of the things that my university and my previous university in Manchester did was they give you an automatic one week extension onto your projects and it's just a little bit of time but it definitely does help with your university life just alleviating the stress a little bit so that you can you can stay on track and you can keep up with people who don't have any sort of disabilities. Your next port of call is the support office so I'm guessing that most universities have a support office. They can usually take the form of maybe like HRs or human resources and they'll generally be a set of people who work there who are quite friendly, maybe some of them won't be but they're generally they're quite friendly and nice to go to. During my first years I went to the support office and I got talking to someone who for the long run throughout my university course has been a really great supportive person to help me out with submitting mitigating certain circumstances but also for helping me organise counselling appointments appointments with Das talking to my personal advisors and giving me a lot more help in solidifying any any problems that I had to some of the more academic people that I was interacting with. The best way to do this is to just to go and talk to talk to a few people if you find someone's not very helpful go to another person ask if there's anyone else that you can speak to you don't have to say it directly on the spot if you're having a talk with one of the people from the support office but if you after that if you send them an email and you say oh I'd like to talk to someone else they'll be very happy for that I mean they have to because it's part of their job but it's good to find someone that can anchor you in in in the university life like a support office person who has links to anyone that you would need to talk to and anyone that you need to try and convince that you need some extra help. The next important person to consider is your personal advisor when you go to university you are assigned a tutor which is a person who teaches you sort of scientific skills dissects research papers gives you some exam help helps you with your coursework it's sort of a group where everybody comes in from different disciplines in the same sort of school so around the same sort of subject and this person is different to your personal advisor your personal advisor is someone that you meet with maybe two or three times per semester or two or three times per year and they are responsible for keeping a track on how you're doing both mentally personally and also how you're doing in your academics giving you advice helping you get through the year. It's important to develop a good relationship with this person because they have a big say in how you're doing and they can give evidence to to other people just like the support office and considering that you're going to be seeing them quite a lot it's good to really tell them what you've been struggling with what you found helpful what you sound too much and they can give you a lot of good advice and they can help you find the people you need to need to find when it comes to finding jobs getting the right modules finding ones that aren't too stressful finding ones with more coursework a very good person to develop a good relationship with before you start your university life. If you find that you just don't get on with this person maybe they don't understand your disability maybe they're not very empathetic or nice or friendly you can always ask for a new one if you go to your support office if you go to anyone within the faculty that's related to overall supervising personal advisors you will be able to find a new one if they're not they're not doing it for you find a new one don't just live with it you you really need to find someone that's going to help you in your university life. The last thing is mitigating circumstances now if you're having a particularly bad period of time whether it be due to mental health due to other events in your life mitigating circumstances is a form that you can fill out and on the form you can give you can give an idea of what you're struggling with and why and you can also give the units the the unit codes and the modules that you've done that have been affected during this period and when you submit this they will take into account the the low scores that you have and they will change change your grades in in a positive way whether it's removing modules whether it's lowering grade boundaries they will help you get the best marks so if you ever submit a mitigating circumstances form and it works and that you get the all clear you will always get a better result from this so if you are going for a bad period maybe you've you're going for a really bad slump of depression and anxiety and you just can't work and it's affecting your studies mitigating circumstances don't feel any shame about it a lot of people don't have to deal with mental health problems and that helps them in their university degree for us we do suffer we we do suffer a lot and we often need the extra support it's not a case of doing this to get a better grade it's it's a case of doing this because you have a lower grade because of the circumstances that you're in and therefore they will help you a little bit with that you will need to get some evidence for this uh evidence can come from many different services number one being doctor make sure that you try and get as many doctor appointments as you can in a short period of time to talk about your mental health talk about how they can help you and then if you go to the doctors and you ask for some evidence um covering firstly covering the time frame that you want so you need to tell them how how long it's been affected you affecting you and then you also have to say how much it's affecting you and and if they agree to it agree to making a letter they will usually take a payment it's not always the best thing usually between 20 and 30 pounds and once you get that letter you can submit it with the mitigating circumstances and that will sort of solidify any any sort of problems that you've explained to them in the the form that you fill down another good place to get evidence from is Das it's good to set up Das appointments when you're having a tough time just so that they can get it on the system you just want to spray out all the problems that you've had make sure that they understand just how horrible it is make sure you explain why explain maybe explain why autism is affecting you in this way why these events affected this and why you're having such a strong reaction to these these problems that you're having you could also have an issue with some family members passing or anything like that is definitely a very important thing to put on a mitigating circumstances it's very important to get it through the GP and through the Das make sure that they know about it just in that circumstances where stuff like that happens even people without mental problems they can get mitigating for that the last thing that you might need to consider is if there is a problem where you've been involved in some kind of uh police type thing you've been either someone's committed a crime against you you've been injured you've been hurt you're very sort of mentally sensitive to to life in general because of this event that is also an important thing to put on your mitigating circumstances form although it is rare you will need to get a police report as well to submit with your mitigating circumstances just to give that evidence just to make sure that you you've got all you've got all the evidence behind it so that they take you seriously when it comes to analyzing your case at the end of the year that's the end of this video uh i've covered Das or i mean Das is my my disability service disability service support office personal advisor mitigating circumstances those are all very important things to consider if you're going into university with a disability or it be autism mental health problems anything like that if if you need support for it or you would feel like it would benefit you get it done very helpful it's been incredibly helpful for me especially the relationships that i've built with the support office and my personal advisor thank you very much for watching if you have any more questions about any of the things that i've covered please drop them in the comments or go over to my facebook page at asperger's growth drop me a message and i'll try and get back to you as soon as possible if you like the video and you found it helpful please like it because then i know that i'm doing something good um and if you didn't like obviously you can do a dislike but don't do that just just just ignore don't don't press don't press that button don't you don't stop and if you want to see some more autism mental health self-help related content make sure hey how was that make sure to hit that subscribe button and hit the notification bell the little ding ding bell on the side and then you will get notifications when my very irregular videos come out and it will make sure that you stay up to date with all the asperger's growth related content thank you very much for watching you've been lovely you look beautiful today i hope you're having a wonderful day and i'll see you in the next video see you later