I had attended only one school before I came to GFA. The thought of leaving a place that felt like home was, to be honest, terrifying. But GFA is such a welcoming place. There are smiles everywhere. My friends gave me the motivation to reach higher. That’s how it works here.

We take STEAM class in our homeroom. You start sitting at the rug. The teacher explains what project we will work on that day—like designing snowflakes and printing them on the 3D printer. Or building a tower using paper and tape. Then we go to our tables and talk with our teammates and make a plan. We get to work together and be creative. There’s a lot of excitement in the room.

We see learning — and life! — differently. We want you to discover what you love to do,
what you care about, who you really are. Mastery of content gets you only so far. We cultivate curiosity, creativity, and intrinsic motivation — the qualities that help you go farther.

His world is an open songbook. From the formative years at GFA to a job at Facebook, music weaves in and out of his life, tying each experience to the next. Rapper, marketer, family man, volunteer, mentor, Patterson sees music as a way not just to fuse together the different facets of his life, but to share them with others.