Life at the Academy

Live among people who are as curious as you are.

The Academy is designed as a residential community, not just a place you come to take courses.

You’ll live, work, eat, build, read, argue, explore, and spend time alongside people pursuing things of their own. The campus is the center of gravity: a place to do serious work, but also somewhere friendships, collaborations, and unexpected ideas can take shape.

You make the culture.

Students can start clubs, host salons, organize dinners or outings, run a podcast, form a reading group, go climbing, make music, play sports, build something together, or create entirely new traditions.

The Academy provides the space, connections, and support to make things happen. The community is shaped by the people in it.

Salons
Podcast
Book club
Clubs
Sports & outdoor activities
Creative projects
Student-hosted events
And more

Student-led activities / community visual

Some things are worth doing together, every week.

A small number of shared rituals give the community its rhythm.

Community dinners bring everyone back around the same table. Friday Reviews create a regular moment to share progress, setbacks, discoveries, and what comes next.

And throughout the year, students create opportunities to show one another what they have been building, learning, and exploring.

San Francisco expands the campus.

Some of the world’s most interesting companies, labs, founders, engineers, artists, and institutions are within reach.

Students might visit a company, tour a technical space, spend an afternoon at a cultural institution, meet someone working at the frontier of a field, or simply follow their curiosity somewhere new.

The Bay Area gives you an extraordinary amount to explore. The Academy gives you a community to come back to.

Your life is bigger than your work.

Not everything you pursue needs to become a company, a career, or even a project.

Read because you want to read. Learn an instrument. Dance. Paint. Hike. Cook with friends. Become obsessed with something impractical.

The Academy should leave room for the interests, friendships, hobbies, and experiences that make a life feel expansive.

Show what you’re capable of.

The annual showcase brings together students, families, founders, investors, funders, and the wider Academy community.

It’s a chance to share what you built, learned, researched, wrote, made, or discovered along the way.

Come and live it.

Applications for the next cohort are open. Tell us what you want to work on, and we will tell you what HAA can do for it.

Apply to HAA