If I’ve learned nothing from my brief time sharing the planet with 7 billion people spinning through the wild blue yonder of space, is that with choice comes consequence. Sometimes our choices are good ones and others not so much. Overall, I’ve done reasonably well with making sound choices, but my choice to drop out of high school at 17 wasn’t one of them.

It certainly had profound consequences which affected my life early on and became the driving reason I chose an online degree college to earn my degree from.

Let me be clear, no one grows up setting out in life to become a high school dropout. For me it was a perfect storm of events and lack of guidance in life that pushed me to that choice. Despite this, I’d always assumed traditional college would be the path I’d follow, then a good job, the family, white picket fence, and happily ever after. However, my choice to leave high school altered all of that.

Though I don’t recall the exact day I left my high school for good, I can still remember the intense feelings of uncertainty and generally being lost that ensued. Eventually, time and effort saw me straighten out the hurdles that choice had on my life, but it had squarely prevented me from attending the traditional college of my dreams as a youth.

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