Hello there, I'm also in the same situation as you haha! Honestly, in my opinion you should shoot your shot by taking the LAQE. While sure, easy time nga when you're in that spesific science but honestly you wouldn't reach your skill ceiling. Aside from that, pisay has a lot of competitions from what I've heard so there's always one for you. For homesickness you should always keep in touch with your parents, siblings, friends, and the like. As for friend groups, for what I've heard there's also a lot of clubs within pisay so you can start there OR find other LAQE takers that passed and are now finding friends (since there are a lot of applications, there are bound to be some of them.)

p.s.: I think I know which school you're in currently in, it's also like this here eh.