I don’t recommend you get a GED. Sure it’s better than NOTHING… but if that’s all your striving for, employers will take notice. If you don’t get your diploma and decide you want to go to a four year later on down the road, you’ll have to go back to a two year college and take remedial type coursework in order to bring you back up to where you would have been (for general education requirements) if you had only stayed in school. If you think high school is hard and long, wait until you change your mind down the road.

Something you really need to take into consideration about those technical schools (ECPI is a prime example-check the fine print – we do NOT accept transfer credit of any kind from them) is that you check for accreditation. If they are NOT accredited, NOTHING you take will be transferable into anything other than a non accredited institution. (7 years in college did teach me something, even though it took me until I was 37 to learn it., pride or not. That was three years ago.) I’ve taught and advised at a four year state college and a community college. I’m very familiar with the general education prerequisites.

It’s such a good idea for you to ask for advice from a forum such as this one. This shows that you are seeking information. It tells me you are serious about a decision that will affect you and your life.

If you have any more specific questions, please feel free to ask: me, the guys here, your advisor, a collegiate advisor (that’s what we’re here for.)

Find out if your school makes allowances for a free day or two to visit campus’. They’ll do that here in NC for the high schoolers. Make a point to visit the campuses (even out of state. I can put you in touch with an advisor from ECU – she’s also my BFF so I know she’d know exactly what would or wouldn’t transfer or from what schools. )

If I had the choice, I would do a lot of things differently personally. I finished high school, but thought I knew everything…. and a chain of events kept me from a BS for a very long while. Just… please… make the effort to build your foundation. You’ll be so glad you did.

My daughter, she’s 17 now, but she went to summer school this past summer for 2 credits she needed to graduate, a year early. She was 16 when she graduated high school. She was taught that a GED is nothing compared to what a high school diploma says about you.

I wish you the best, but no matter what anyone says, the GED stands for quitter and it will never change. I’m 38 years old and I still have to explain why I didn’t graduate high school when I apply for a job.

I myself got my GED as soon as I was 16, though I was home schooled up until then and also married young. When I was 18, I became a shift manager and bought our first home, at 20 I worked as a bank teller and when I was 21 I started my own website designing & maintenance business that I am still running with my husband working for me and an assistant.
So it greatly depends on the person as to what you will do, with what you achieve.

As far as the sleep thing. Has it never occurred to anyone that there is reason that teens sleep late???
Here is one link for you: http://www.nhs.uk/livewell/Childrenssleep/Pages/Whyteenssleeptoomuch.aspx
You can Google a ton of articles on the subject.

A second sleep point is there is a thing called “Delayed sleep phase syndrome” where to us living in the “normal society’s” time is like you having 6 hours of jet lag! It’s not our fault and we aren’t lazy for it. Lucky I have a career where I CAN sleep the way I need to. I myself can’t go to bed before 4 or 5 am and I will sleep till 2pm. I can not sleep for a night (which is what I have done right now) but still won’t be tired till 3 am the next night. If I walk my sleeping around the clock it might stick for a couple weeks but nothing permanent. More info at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delayed_sleep_phase_syndrome

My third point is, do you know that you don’t have a learning disability? My husband is brilliant with all the knowledge of pop, gamer & movie trivia but math just is so confusing to him. He completed 4 of the tests for his GED but can’t pass math due to dyscalculia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia This is something that should have been caught in high school but never was.

Now my 15yo sister that has lived with me since January, needed public school after years of homeschooling not really working for her. She wouldn’t push herself to get the homework done and my mom wasn’t getting her to do it either. So after 6 months of me pushing her in homeschooling, we put her in public school and she is doing great. Started out with C’s, B’s and A’s, and now is straight A’s with half of them being A+ and on the honor roll. My husband wants her to get her HS diploma rather than her GED, which she was wanting to do.

So I would say if you can finish high school than great! But DEFIANTLY get your GED.

Choosing a GED over a High School Diploma is Darwinism in action. If you are able to convince yourself you don’t need it, or that your ‘laziness’ is some sort of justification for skipping it, or that the fact you can’t manage to wake up before 8am are any kind of legitimate reasons… you are already on the path to complete failure.

“Oh, I can’t wake up that early”… what kind of BS is *that*? FFS.

Good luck. For the record, I did not graduate. Not because I didn’t want to, because the High School refused to graduate me even though I had already taken every course they had to offer by the end of my junior year (3rd yr French, AP English, AP Physics, AP Chemistry, Differential Equations). Most of my AP classes were actually at the state college, not the High School. I told them to stuff it, passed the High School Proficiency Exam, got a 1550 on my SAT and enrolled at Humboldt State University. Even to this day, I get questions on why I don’t have a HS diploma, and I’m 43.

But… I know it’s kind of useless to tell a junior anything. You probably already had your mind made up before you asked the question, and were only looking for validation.

Sorry if I sound harsh. Reality bites. Get used to it.