I currently am a junior at a private school in Washington state. I have a 4.0 gpa and am on track for a STEM diploma with Honors.
However, I’ve been thinking about doing Running Start my senior year, for a variety of reasons. My school doesn’t have many opportunities or clubs, and since I want to go into engineering (perhaps mechanical?), college sems to be offering a lot more in the way of experience and clubs. Running Start would also allow me to get ahead on a lot of prerequisites required to get into the UW programs I’m looking at.
But at my high school, I would graduate with a diploma that means a lot, since our curriculum is fairly rigorous. Plus, I would miss my friends a lot while they all enjoyed bonding during senior year.
Any thoughts on what I should do in my situation?
I’m wondering the same thing except my school is more of a magnet/charter high school. And our coursework is really rigorous but my GPA isn’t as high as yours and I’m also looking to go to UW. In my opinion I’d stay where you’re at you’ll get into UW no problem due to your GPA. But I’m pretty sure you would get your AA and diploma at the same time if you do part time running start which I’m considering 
DO IT! Becoming a Running Start student was one of the greatest decisions I have made. I promise you will make new friends if you are active on the college campus. Running Start offers you so many new opportunities; I got a job as a tutor; I was employed as a tour guide; I joined a STEM club and went of a field trip to LIGO; I took engineering physics and every math course offered past pre-calculus (linear algebra, differential equations, taylor series, calc I-IV). Trust me, if you want to learn much more interesting material, and get ahead academically, Running Start is for you.
I will be walking into UW as a junior (100 credits), and taking the most rigorous courses in community college will not only look good to UW (and potentially increase your chance of direct admittance into your major), but will be extremely satisfying.
A while back I made a blog post about why I love Running Start so much. Here is the link: http://parisimo.blogspot.com/2016/03/running-start.html
I matured a lot from my experience in Running Start. It acts as a good bridge between high school and university.
Please excuse any spelling errors on my blog. No one ever reads it so it is more of a “dumping space” for myself to refer to.