Hi.
I posted here last year about some unusual test scores and the difficulty I was having with interpreting them. A lot of things have happened since then and I feel like I may need some more advice.
College admissions turned out to be a disaster. I think I've got a pretty good idea of what went wrong, but I've not been able to stop beating myself up over the results. Clearly they indicate either that I'm unintelligent or that I'm intelligent but will never be given the chance to prove it.
I applied to a total of nine universities: Brown, Caltech, Harvey Mudd, NYU, UChicago, UW, MIT, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. I was accepted to only three: UW, NYU, and UCLA.
I think my error was failing to appear human. I had very few ECs and only a handful of volunteer hours. I wrote my essays about my passion for math and desire to share the beauty of math with others by becoming a professor. Although at the time of my last post I had planned to go into physics, my interest has since shifted towards applied math (since math has applications both
in physics and elsewhere).
This is just the latest installment in a dreadfully long personal history of failure. I was never recognized as gifted because the district didn't look at individual IQ results. I applied to the Robinson Center's UW Academy program for early college only to be rejected once again. I had a 36 on the ACT and the highest score from any student accepted that year was a 35. My physics teacher even wrote in his letter of recommendation about going over quantum mechanics with me and that he "[had] a master's degree in physics and [had] nothing more to teach [me]." I applied to three summer programs after my junior year - RSI, SSP Astrophysics, and PROMYS. I was rejected from the first two and waitlisted at the last. Eventually they took me off the waitlist and accepted me into the program. I attended and enjoyed it greatly, but I still feel it would've been better to get some additional research experience than to just learn more number theory, modern algebra, and combinatorics.
One thing I did enjoy about the last year was discovering the option to take classes as a non-matriculated student at UW. In addition to PDEs, I also took courses in fluid dynamics, stochastic modeling, Chinese linguistics, thermodynamics, advanced stochastic processes, optimization theory/convex analysis, and dynamical systems. The way I approached the work wasn't very healthy though. I'd take notes but never study them, and I'd wait until the day before homework was due to work on it and then grind out page after page of LaTeX into the early hours of the morning. This worked for me until very recently - I didn't receive any grades below 4.0.
It eventually became quite galling to compare my results in these classes to college results. There were graduate students in my fluid dynamics class, for example, who'd gone to Caltech, MIT, and numerous other top undergrad schools. Yet I'd always receive the highest test scores in the class by a significant margin. The average on the final was 77.6% and I scored 100%. Taking twice as many credits as the threshold for full-time enrollment status didn't push me.
There was also a problem connecting with the other students. In many of these classes the majority were working on their PhDs and 7 or more years older than me. That's a huge gap in life experience. And especially difficult to bridge for a student who's only on campus for a small fraction of the day.
Caltech hurt the most. My fluid dynamics professor had gone there for his undergrad and master's degrees and strongly recommended the school to me. He wrote my recommendation. It seemed he was happy that it would be such a good fit. Then they didn't take me.
I tried to kill myself the day I received the news. Emptied a bottle of antidepressants. That put me in the hospital for a few days.
Since then I don't think I've been dealing effectively with anything. I took my final exam for dynamical systems shortly after that and managed again to obtain the highest score in the class, but I'm now worried that I may have damaged my brain to the point of not being able to do math anymore. I resorted to using quite a few substances (alcohol, cannabis, DXM, DMT, salvia, kratom, LSA, nitrous oxide, and solvents) as a form of escapism. My parents found me on a couple of occasions passed out with a bottle - once covered in vomit. DXM put me in the hospital again (accidentally this time) when I took over a gram and went into acute urinary retention. The only one I'm still using at this point is kratom, which I started as a form of self-medication. I kept feeling this persistent ache in my chest that kratom helped to numb. I've just gotten a prescription for antidepressants that I hope to replace it with. There are some things I'm even less proud of doing and don't care to share.
With all these disruptions, I was unfortunately unable to register for classes at UW for Spring quarter. I'm disappointed since I particularly wanted to do one pure math course in analysis on manifolds, but I'm probably not smart enough anymore to understand it.
I'd begun work on a very interesting research project (modeling optimal proliferation of Chlamydia with tools from stochastic control - especially interesting since it drew on some of the material I'd learned in molecular bio) with one of my professors last year but stopped sending my progress on it after I received college results. There's probably no opportunity to resume.
I stopped working on my classwork too. I never finished optimization or advanced stochastic processes. I took incompletes in the classes but couldn't bring myself to slave away for such a travesty of a future. Now I've failed both.
Being chosen as a Semifinalist for US Presidential Scholar helped to boost my self-esteem temporarily but the inevitable elimination in the final round only reminded me that I'll never achieve anything worthwhile.
There's one person I've met who actually seems to understand me. I have a rather close relationship with her, which I might like to make closer, but it's probably impossible. And that hurts me more than anything else. I've joined the Triple Nine Society in hopes of finding somebody else to talk to but I doubt that'll work.
I've also been wondering if I had an even cognitive profile all along but ASD masked it. I know that a lot of the hobbyist "high-range" tests are extremely inaccurate, but I've taken a few for fun and almost always managed to get either the highest or second highest score (not mattering whether they were verbal or spatial). The theoretical scores I've gotten on these are usually around 170 - likely inflated in almost every case but suggesting at least that my verbal and nonverbal abilities aren't too far apart. As far as CPI goes, I've taken both the auditory digit span test at
https://timodenk.com/blog/digit-span-test-online-tool/ (12 forward, 10 reverse, 10 sequenced on first attempt) and the symbol search and digit-symbol substitution tasks on
https://www.millisecond.com/ (78 raw SS, 141 raw substitution).
I don't want to go to college at 18. It's a sick joke. I taught myself calculus when I was 12 and scored a 2380 on a practice SAT in 8th grade. If only I'd signed up to take it officially through a talent search, perhaps I'd be better off now. But I can just picture the school telling me I'm too stupid for that.
What do I do now? I'm trying out a new therapist - my last didn't really work that well. Do I go to university? Do I try to salvage my chance with UCLA? Do I go to community college? 90% of me just wants to turn my back on academia forever and never look back.
