School has barely started, and I've still never been more stressed in my entire life. All I have to look forward to this semester is busting butt and getting bare-minimum amounts of sleep.
My life feels almost oxymoronic at the moment -- I'm taking 18 credit hours at my local community college (most people so far have asked me if I'm insane for taking so many credit hours) but I'm also filling out my college applications for next fall. See, the thing is, not only am I a senior in high school, but I'm also a sophomore in college. I graduate in May of 2012, but at my graduation, I won't only be holding a high school diploma, but I'll also have my A.A. under my belt. I am able to do this through a program called full-time dual enrollment, which just basically means that I'm a high school student that takes all my classes at a local community college, and I earn both high school and college credit for them.
Making the decision to go full-time dual enrollment wasn't necessarily the easiest decision I made, but it has been the most rewarding so far. When I started to get sick of the normal daily high school grind of waking up at 5:30 a.m and being babysat at school for seven hours, I started to think of ways that I could make my education work for me, instead of my having to work for it. Virtual school was an option, but I figured I would miss the social interaction that comes along with being in class. I started researching more into dual enrollment and how I could earn college credits as well as high school credits taking the classes I wanted to take when I wanted to take them, and I immediately fell in love with the concept. The hard part, though, was giving up a good majority of my high school career. In order to do full-time dual enrollment, I had to leave behind my safe high school cocoon.
I don't think I realized just how much I would be missing out on with my friends until I left high school and started college. All of the sudden, I had no idea about the upcoming spirit events that were going on, or the latest drama of who was dating who, or even about the embarrassing blunder that one of the anchors made on our high school morning news program. I instantly became out of touch with my high school peers and what they were doing or talking about. I could no longer relate to the conversations that they were having or the activities that they were involved in, purely because I had made the decision to leave my high school and take college classes. While I didn't try to change any of the aforementioned in my junior year of high school, I am trying to make my senior year better. This year, I'm determined to go to every school dance (I've never been to one before!) be in the yearbook (I missed out in my junior year), go to football games (once again, I never really went much) and try my best to keep my high school social life well-maintained. Let's see how that goes.