My name is Cal Gamble. I’m in my first year of study and my course is Creative Media Technology.

I’m more socially awkward than the average person. With some people, it takes a lot more effort to talk to them than other people and therefore there’s awkward silences. And then secondly, I’m slower in processing information than the average student. I think I’m working really fast on the software, trying to get used to this, that or the other. Whereas other students, they look at other monitors and they’ve almost finished the task.

And I don’t understand how they do it, to be honest with you! It’s been difficult.

I find transitions quite tough. It probably isn’t what I expected it to be because I felt as though I was thrown in the deep end more or less straight away. It differs because you don’t get as much guidance as in secondary school or 6th form where I was.

I just have difficulties when I should start and when I should finish basically. Like my body basically tells me when I’m tired but I ignore that and I try to continue to get the work done because in my first semester I spent about 70 hours a week instead of 35 and therefore you were much more responsible for how many hours you put into your work. It was quite tough.

The specific support is my specialist learning mentor who I see once a week and it’s easy to get hold of them because I communicate to them via text if there’s an issue. I think people recognise that I’m good at what I do because even though I process information slower I’m also able to take in feedback what my tutors give me. We have these feedback sheets where we write down what is good about the current assignment that we’ve just done and what is bad. My tutors send me video tutorials where I look at the software and then you can just pause the video once you get stuck on something and then go back and then go forwards again and yeah. I mean it’s a work in progress but it’s developing quite nicely.

The only thing that I’ve really noticed now is the Autism&Uni, that is one big thing and it’s really helpful in terms of how the code of the website, because I’ve seen the website and some of the videos that I’ve seen.

My specialist learning mentor will meet once a week and go into a room and talk about the history of autism, how problems that I’ve had within the week and how to overcome them. I get feedback sheets at the end of each semester where I write down what’s good about the course and what could be improved. And then as a privilege of being the course rep, I have meetings with the Dean of the course or of the faculty.