Honestly, I was an RA in a university and I spend a lot of my time coaching kids and getting them through Engineering school.

First of all, you sound like an ideal candidate for an engineering program, like Computer Science, Computer Engineering and Electrical Engineering (based on your interests stated). You're smart, which is good. Smart kids' downfalls are typically getting lazy and not knowing how to study. Put your nose to the grindstone and use the first few classes to really hammering out your study technique and I think it would be completely worth the extra time and money. Not to mention, FASFA is your friend.

I really want to emphasize that if you start of at a Community College you'll miss out on a lot of the student life opportunities, not to mention taking entry level classes with stellar teachers about topics you never knew would interest you.

My boyfriend is going through community college now and is blowing everyone out of the water by simply studying and doing what the professors ask of him. He doesn't have networks of classmates that have his level of interest to work with, he pulls more than his weight for most of the projects, and he really feels overly busy and struggles to find the resources he needs to succeed. The professors expect the kids to be lazy and not pass simply out of disinterest, and he tells me that in every class the professor teaches just to him because everyone sleeps and stays far away from the professor.

It would be much easier to get into the habit of being lazy too in community college. We are also in a state where the community colleges are rated very highly, but there seems to be, at his particular college, a real lack of enthusiasm.

My suggestion is, for the bit of money you'd save going to community college, you might as well get the full experience at university. It takes time to figure out how their system works, how to apply for classes and dispute things with financial aid and do fasfa, it would be worth it to be immersed in a hardworking, educated culture from the get go. Not that community college students aren't hardworking, but simply that the environment is different.

Best of luck.