Christine Young shares her experience attending and graduating from GAC. An alumna of University of Texas, Christine currently works as a Studio Assistant at Jaunt VR, a virtual reality media company in Santa Monica, California. High school students all around the U.S. learn the same geometry, chemistry, English, and P.E. Being a student at GAC is a vastly different experience.

Not everyone is able to learn geometry from a teacher who is also your basketball coach and leads your team to become state runner-up.

Not everyone has a chemistry teacher who helps someone like me, a film student who hates science, test out of eight credit hours of college-level chemistry.

Not everyone has a strength and conditioning coach who is willing to dedicate precious workout time to have devotionals – and then train students with excellence, allowing me to be a walk-on to the University of Texas rowing team.

GAC’s excellent academics did, of course, play a huge part in my college career at the University of Texas, but, more importantly, my experience at GAC helped me develop a foundation built on Christ.

All of my teachers have had a significant impact on me because of what they shared in common. They all proclaimed that Jesus is Christ and that through Him we are unstoppable. And this love is what I remember most about them and my time in their classes.

Losing that state basketball championship was painful, but it gave me the character to help lead our UT rowing team to a Big 12 championship only one year later. Film is a very edgy business, and having a Christ-centered background allows me to push forward with the armor of God. GAC helped me understand the value of relationship, which was instrumental in helping me be accepted into the first collegiate 3D film program in the U.S. GAC helped me learn to have the strength to pursue Him despite secular aspects of college.

I can’t recite the periodic table, but I can boldly say that through God’s gift of patience to that dear chemistry teacher, I am able to take more film classes instead of required core classes, allowing me to glorify Him through my passion of film.

By no means is any high school perfect, but when you can go on mission trips to Kenya every year for spring break and proclaim the gospel alongside your own mother, classmates, and teachers, you know that God is alive and working in your school. And while I did have to wear a bracelet over that cross tattoo that I got senior year, it has since been a reminder of the One who loved me enough to pay the ultimate price.

These are the memories I cherish from my time at GAC, and I attribute them to Greater Atlanta Christian School’s active pursuit of Christ.