Let me start by saying that I have had depression since high school, although not nearly as severe. Also, I am clinically depressed, depression runs in my family, and I have been on medication although it doesn’t work. I started school as a freshman at a university in Pennsylvania. I was on the swim team there and I was the perfect program, a 5 year masters degree program for forensic science. I had good grades and I liked my teachers and my classes. I am also dyslexic and the classes were all small enough (less than 25 people) that I could get the help that I needed from each of my teachers. I was absolutely miserable there. I was sort of friends with the swim team and had a few other friends from my major, but I never did much with them because everyone there drank and I didn’t, I mean I did not meet a single other person who did not want to drink. I think what bothered me the most though was the cold, I absolutely hate the cold. I am from Tennessee where everything closes when we get an inch of snow and schools have even closed in my hometown because it was too cold outside. I was very depressed, I thought it was the cold, and the fact that I wasn’t doing well in swimming, but with a lot of help from my parents and swim coach at home, I decided to transfer schools.
Now, two and a half years later, I am in my junior year at Rice. I thought that if I could get away from the cold, I wouldn’t be depressed anymore but it is worse than ever. It is hard to get out of bed most days, even to do triathlon training which I love more than anything. I am on medicine and I have seen a psychologist but nothing helps. The reason I am depressed is because I am such a failure, I have always felt like a failure but not that I am barely passing any of my classes it is much worse. I am no longer on a swim team (I found after freshman year that I am a very good triathlete so I am doing that instead) and so I do not have any friends. I have never been a social person so not being on a team that forces you to interact with people has really hurt my ability to make friends. I have tried to talk to people in my classes but I have absolutely nothing to say when I am around other people. I would honestly join a sorority just so that I would have a group of people to be friends with but they don’t have that here. There is also just as much drinking and partying here as there was at my old school and I absolutely do not want to be a part of that (my uncle is an alcoholic so I am terrified of drinking and I will never drink even though I am 21 so it is legal). My grades are very bad. The classes have been incredibly overwhelming since the day I got here and I have struggled just to pass since last year. I have never been considered smart but I didn’t think I was so stupid that I would fail 2 classes and get 2 other Ds. My classes are also huge. Most have well over 100 people, one class I am in has over 300, so I am not able to get the help from my teachers that I need because of my dyslexia. If I had known this before choosing this school I wouldn’t have come here, but the school advertised a 6:1 faculty to student ratio and said they had a great disability support service. This school does not have a forensic science degree either.
I don’t know if I should try to transfer back to my first university and just try to deal with the cold, or if I should just try to get through three more semesters here. I thought I was miserable there and that was causing my depression, but now I am just as depressed if not more here.