I spent five years studying computer science at FH Technikum Wien. Five years. Not because I couldn't do it. I understood the material. I actually liked most of it. But my brain works differently, and the university never figured out what to do with that. So every time something went wrong, the answer was simple. My fault.
Some context, because it matters: my parents are both doctors in Syria. My younger brother is a doctor. My other brother is an engineer at a German company. The pattern in my family is that people study, finish, and work. I am the exception.
Their situation is also fundamentally different from mine. They do not have the conditions I have. They have not had to navigate them alone, in a country that refuses to accommodate them, without family nearby, without a peer community, without anyone who understands. What I am pointing to here is not capability, not background, not effort. It is autism and ADHD meeting a system that has given me no support, no understanding, no scaffolds. That is what produces this outcome.
What exams are actually like with ASD
Here's what people don't get. I can understand a concept completely. Like, deeply. But when I sit down in an exam and read a question, my brain connects it to something slightly different from what the professor meant. It makes total sense to me. I write my answer. I hand it in. Wrong.
Not because I didn't study. Not because I didn't know the material. Because I read the question and my brain took it somewhere else. That's what ASD does. It's not confusion. It's a different interpretation that feels just as valid in the moment.
This happened constantly. I'd prepare for weeks. Go into the exam feeling solid. Then one weird phrasing and everything falls apart. Afterward I'd try to explain what happened. That I misunderstood the question, that it's connected to how my brain processes language. Nobody wanted to hear it. You got it wrong. Next.
The programming project
This one still gets to me. There was a programming project where you had three attempts to pass. During COVID, they relaxed the rules. If you failed the first attempt, you could keep working on the same project for the second. Made sense. I did that. Same project, first try into second try.
Then came the third try. I figured the same rules still applied. Why wouldn't they? Nobody said anything different. So I kept working on my project. Then one day, completely by chance, I asked the professor a question about my code. And he just casually mentioned that the third attempt requires a completely new project.
Nobody told me. There was no email. No announcement. No update on the course page. Nothing. I found out by accident. Eight days before the deadline.
Eight days. Everyone else had two months. I had eight days to build something from scratch. I failed. Obviously.
Fighting for help every single time
There was no system in place. No standard accommodations for neurodivergent students. Every single time I needed something, I had to start from zero. Explain my diagnosis. Show the paperwork. Remind them that I exist. Convince someone that yes, this is real, and yes, I still need help.
By the time anyone did anything, it was already too late. That's the thing. You don't get help before you fail. You fail first. Then you try to get help. Then they tell you they can't do anything retroactively. So what's the point?
And when miscommunication happened, when I understood an instruction differently because that is literally how ASD works, there was zero willingness to consider that maybe the instruction wasn't clear enough. It was never "let's figure out what went wrong." It was "you should have known." You should have asked. You should have understood. Every single time, the entire weight of the miscommunication landed on me.
Funny how COVID changed everything overnight
When COVID hit, the university suddenly understood that people struggle under difficult circumstances. They adjusted deadlines. They changed exam formats. They let students continue projects across attempts. Everyone got patience and flexibility because everyone agreed the situation was hard.
But ASD? ADHD? Conditions that don't go away after a few months? Conditions that make every semester feel like what COVID felt like for everyone else? Nothing. No adjustments. No flexibility. COVID was temporary and the entire world bent over backwards for it. My brain is permanent and nobody bends at all.
The "education quality" excuse
Whenever I pushed back on something, whenever I said this isn't fair, the response was always about standards. We can't give you special treatment. We have to maintain education quality. If we make exceptions, it lowers the bar for everyone.
Think about that for a second. The rules changed without anyone telling me. I got eight days while everyone else got two months. I had a documented condition that the university had on file. Miscommunication that could be directly explained by my diagnosis was treated as carelessness. And their concern was education quality. Not fairness. Not whether their system actually works for everyone. Just whether it looks rigorous on paper.
After five years I was done. Not because I gave up on the material. I never stopped understanding the material. I was done because every path led to the same place. My fault. Try again. No help. Fail again. There was nothing left to try that I hadn't already tried.