<p>Hey guys just wanted to asked a question really quick.</p>
<p>I am screwing up so bad. I have an apartment i am 17 years old and trying to go to college and i am ****ING it up so bad. I keep getting absences because i sleep late , my alarm clock doesnt wake me up and i miss class and im getting dropped from classes. I am such a freakin screw up and responsbility sucks :/ . (Dorms were full) I am still in my first semester not even to mid terms yet. Is there a way to fix this.Can i drop the rest of my classes or something and this not look bad on me? I can miss only 1 day in every class now and thats it. I really want to do well in school i really freakin do and im screwing it up. I just want to fix it now that i understand the ropes. Can any one tell me something maybe? Im really worried because i dont know what to do...</p>
<p>Get a loud alarm clock. And get a roommate. It’s obvious that you CAN’T handle living alone responsibly yet, so having someone there to set you straight or even just serve as an example would be highly beneficial to you. Or just GO TO BED EARLIER.</p>
<p>Get a loud alarm clock and let it sit in a cooking pot. It will echo and wake up your entire hall but you will get to class on time. </p>
<p>That was what my mom made me do in high school. >.<</p>
<p>I also always set my alarm for an hour and a half earlier than I have to wake up because realistically it takes me a half hour to 45 minutes to get ready, so it allows me some time to sleep in-- which I inevitably do. And knowing I am getting up that much earlier I go to bed a little bit earlier. I am rarely late using that system. </p>
<p>If it’s before the deadline for a W you can drop and it won’t even matter, but that may have some ugly ramifications for you. Is this apartment student housing? Will you lose it if you drop out? Will you be allowed to go back home? Do you have a job? What will you do in the meantime? How will you explain the gap in your education to colleges when you try to apply again? It may be in your best interest to do some soul searching and start doing what you need to do to finish up these classes with decent grades.</p>
<p>I think you need to withdraw from school, and do fulltime work or do fulltime volunteer work for at least a year until you become mature enough to handle college. Not everyone is ready for college at age 17. I don’t think that dropping out now will hurt you. Far better to withdraw now than to flunk out.</p>
<p>Are you getting enough hours of sleep? If not, that might be part of the reason you have trouble waking up. Even if you’re technically getting enough hours, try going to bed extra early until your internal clock adjusts.</p>
<p>Getting up early can be hard, especially if you aren’t used to it. One thing I do is have a little motivational thing I can do before school. For example, instead of getting up at 5:30, I get up at 5:00, pop in a DVD of a favorite half hour show (which actually only lasts 22 minutes without commercials) and watch an episode while doing some “morning stuff” like eating breakfast, gathering my books, etc. It makes getting up more bearable! Of course, to make this work you need enough self-control and self-insight to time it right–give yourself A LOT of extra time the first week you try it and watch the clock.</p>
<p>You’ve pretty much got a choice. Either you withdraw and, as Northstarmom suggested, you go do something else until you mature enough to handle it or you commit to doing absolutely everything right from here on out. The easier option is Northstarmom’s (and it also has the advantage of you getting yourself an education you take seriously, which will be a lot better than the one you’re getting now), and if you want to stay in school this semester you should think this through very thoroughly. Not wanting to live with the consequences of withdrawing is not the same as being prepared to do the work that finishing the semester successfully, and if you commit yourself to being more responsible than you are really going to be you may end up with significantly worse consequences than the ones you don’t want to choose now.</p>
<p>You also need to look into how the different choices you can make affect your financial aid, if you are getting any. You need to look into how they will affect your parents’ willingness to support you, if they are doing that. You need to look into how not taking the classes you’ve already been dropped from will affect your ability to graduate on time (with or without taking summer classes) or within four and a half or five years. You need to look into whether you can afford your share of the rent with the sort of job you can get now (especially if your parents are helping you while you’re in school) and what your responsibilities will be if you want to move out, either back to your parents’ or to a cheaper apartment. And that doesn’t just mean asking strangers on a message board: you should go talk to your advisor, to someone at the financial aid office, to your parent(s), and to your roommate and landlord. Those are the people who can give you the information you need to make good decisions about what to do for the rest of this semester and the next.</p>
<p>You may think that you now “understand the ropes,” but what you’ve written doesn’t really come across that way. Stop giving yourself “time to sleep in.” All that does is give yourself permission to not get up when you hear the alarm (in other words, the problem is not that your alarm clock doesn’t wake you up; it’s that you allow yourself to go back to sleep after it wakes you up). Don’t hit “snooze” ever. Get up the first time. (On the other hand, getting up well in advance of when you have to in order to be in class on time and using the mornings to study may be a good idea, especially if you wake up slowly.) Stop thinking of your situation as one in which you can miss a certain number of classes (even if that number is 1 per class). All that does is give yourself permission to cut, and if you can’t trust yourself to make good decisions about cutting – I can’t trust myself to be responsible in this way – then don’t. Commit to attend every class every day. (If you work yourself down to having 0 absences available to you and you get hit by a car on your way to class or one of your parents has a medical emergency and you need to rush to the hospital to be with them or your apartment catches fire at 3 am and the fire department tells you you can’t go back inside to get dressed or to get your books, what are you going to do? These things happen to some students every semester.) Similarly, do the reading every day, do the problem sets and papers with enough time that if your printer breaks or a power outage happens you will still get them in on time, and so on.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to be harsh, but you’ve gotten yourself into a bad situation, and you need to face reality in order to avoid getting yourself into an even worse one.</p>
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