At the beginning of September, the Department of Social Sciences and Languages welcomed a foreign lecturer, Kevin Nickolai from Saint Louis, Missouri, USA. Kevin joins us through the English Language Fellowship program, which enables him to work at our academy for the next ten months.

In his own words, Kevin shared a few lines to introduce himself to our academic community:

Hi everybody. 

I’m Kevin.  I was born the same year as Chris Pratt, Jordan Peele, and Kevin Hart in the year of 1979.  This puts me in a strange generational gap.  I’m not quite Gen X and not quite a Millennial.  Some in my cohort call ourselves the Xennials.   We had an analog childhood and a digital adulthood.  Email crept into our lives just as we stepped foot into college. Cell phones became mandatory just as we were starting our first jobs.  

I’m here at the Armed Forces Academy because I was selected for a special position through the US government called an English Language Fellowship.  This means that I put my name in a hat to be sent just about anywhere in the world.  And when the wheel stopped spinning that little arrow was pointing to Slovakia - thank goodness!

In my hometown of Saint Louis I got my M.A. in Teaching and a B.A. in English from Webster University.  I studied comedy, writing, and improvisation at The Second City conservatory in Chicago.  In Chicago I taught English and Art History for 3 years at Kaplan and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. For the last 12 years I’ve been living with my family in Daejeon, South Korea teaching university students mostly English, but sometimes drama and writing classes. I’ve created online courses for Woosong University and managed teaching workshops through a professional development program.

Outside of the world of academia I ran a volunteer community theatre company called Rustwater Players in the city of Daejeon that produced and developed comedy shows for the expat community.  I love puzzles and I developed encrypted crosswords that were published by the largest English newspaper in South Korea, The Korea Times. I’ve written a few textbooks including Writing the Ten-Minute Play and The Five Paragraph Essay. I am married to Monica Nickolai, a writer-artist-professor and I have one child named Beatrice who creates a comic strip called “The Annoying Dad” which is largely based on me and how annoying I can be.

I love to travel. I’ve tromped across the Great Wall of China, slept on the shores of Loch Ness, snorkeled with loggerheads and blowfish in Jamaica, explored the temple ruins of Angkor Wat, snowboarded Pyeongchang's double black diamonds, mastered cliff diving in Wales, crawled to the depths of Santorini's volcanic craters, devoured active octopi in Seoul, nuzzled tame deer under the moonlit Kasuaga shrine in Nara, conquered the eternal stairway of the Batu Caves, thundered through Sentosa’s Dragon Trail Luge, and plunged off Thailand's highest bungee jump platform at Patong Beach in Phuket. 

Beyond that, my free time is spent writing scripts, playing Tetris, Mario Kart, F-Zero, hiking, biking, listening to podcasts, finding new restaurants, playing Scrabble, delving into creative projects, and finding the best places to eat and get coffee.  I love coffee. 

Kevin is actively involved in teaching English to cadets of various years. In addition to regular classes, he also offers individual conversation sessions, which are available to cadets outside of the regular schedule. AOS staff members will also have the opportunity to participate in these conversation activities, which can be both a language and cultural enrichment.

We are pleased to welcome Kevin to our academic community and believe that his presence at AOS will be beneficial to all involved.