How to Check in with Your Professors at Midterm

Midterm grades are in, and something feels off. For students with ADHD, a learning disability, or anxiety, the hardest part usually isn’t the coursework, it’s actually sending the email or walking into office hours. Here’s how to do it well, and why it matters more than most students realize.

Midterm is the point in the semester where the gap between how a class is going and how you’d like it to be going becomes hard to ignore. For most students, that’s an uncomfortable moment. For students with ADHD, a learning disability, or anxiety, it can be a genuinely difficult one, not because the academic problem is necessarily bigger, but because reaching out about it triggers exactly the kind of avoidance, shame, or dread that these conditions tend to produce.

The good news is that checking in with a professor at midterm is one of the highest-leverage, lowest-risk moves available to a struggling student, and it gets much easier with a plan. Here’s how to approach it.

Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds (and Why That’s Not a Character Flaw)

In high school, a parent or teacher usually initiated the hard conversation for you. In college, no one is going to email your professor on your behalf, and that shift in responsibility lands especially hard for students with ADHD or executive function challenges, for whom initiating an uncomfortable task is often the single hardest step in any process, well ahead of actually doing the task itself.

Anxiety adds its own layer: worry about looking incompetent, about the professor’s reaction, or about having to explain a diagnosis can make a two-minute email feel like a much bigger event than it actually is. None of this means you’re being dramatic or lazy. It means the barrier is real, and it’s worth planning around rather than white-knuckling through.

Before You Reach Out

What to Say in the Email

Keep it short. A clear subject line, a brief explanation, and a specific ask is all you need, according to guidance echoed across multiple student-success resources: state what’s happening and since when, without over-explaining or over-apologizing, and end with a direct request.

You do not need to disclose a diagnosis, a medical history, or personal details to ask for help. Share only what you’re comfortable sharing. “I’ve been having a hard time staying on top of the reading load this semester” is a completely sufficient explanation on its own.

What to Actually Do in Office Hours

Lead with the specific question or grade you brought, not a general apology. Ask what the professor would recommend focusing on for the rest of the term, whether there’s a way to demonstrate understanding you may have missed on a particular assignment, and whether office hours, review sessions, or teaching-assistant support are available going forward. Professors are far more responsive to students who show up with something concrete to work from than to students who arrive only with distress.

If you’re anxious about the conversation itself, it can help to remember that reaching out before you’ve fallen too far behind is read by most professors as responsibility, not weakness. Asking early, before finals are the only remaining option, is exactly the behavior office hours exist to support.

If You Have (or Might Need) Formal Accommodations

College accommodations work differently than the IEP or 504 process in K-12: they’re opt-in, meaning you have to register with your school’s disability services office and choose to share your accommodation letter with professors. Professors generally see only the approved accommodations, not your diagnosis or evaluation history, so disclosure is far more limited than many students expect going in.

If you’re not yet registered and you suspect ADHD, a learning disability, or an anxiety disorder is playing a real role in how you’re performing under timed or high-pressure conditions, it’s not too late to start that process mid-semester, though accommodations generally apply going forward rather than retroactively. A comprehensive evaluation is usually the starting point; our sister practice’s page on college accommodations evaluations walks through what that involves.

How Therapeutic Tutoring Helps With This Specific Problem

For a lot of students, the academic gap and the avoidance around addressing it grow together. A missed assignment becomes easier to avoid discussing the longer it sits, and the anxiety about the conversation compounds along with the coursework itself. Therapeutic tutoring is built specifically for this intersection: sessions combine direct academic catch-up strategy with the executive function and confidence work needed to actually send the email, show up to office hours, and follow through on whatever plan comes out of that conversation.

Our page on therapeutic tutoring for college students covers how sessions are structured around this kind of mid-semester catch-up and self-advocacy work. If ADHD or anxiety specifically is the bigger piece of what’s getting in the way, see ADHD tutoring and anxiety tutoring. For a broader look at the adult-specific presentation of ADHD and anxiety that often complicates college life, our sister practice’s pages on ADHD coaching for college students and therapy for college students go further.