Adam Nicolai
Junior / Theatre Major / Lansdowne, PA

“One thing I’ve learned at Goucher is that there are two things I love,” says Adam Nicolai. “I love theatre, and I love community service. And I’d like to combine them later in life.”

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In many ways, Nicolai’s whole undergraduate career at Goucher—from the benefit play he wrote, directed, and produced to his study-abroad experiences in Ghana and Thailand—has been about finding connections between his two guiding passions.

At least, that’s how it’s turned out.  When he first got to Goucher, he says, he really wasn’t sure about what he wanted to do.  He knew he wanted to go to a small liberal arts school with a broad focus.  He thought about becoming a communication major.  And then, in his first year, he landed the part of Sebastian in Goucher’s production of Twelfth Night, and at least one direction in his education became clear.

“I wouldn’t say it was a life-changing experience, but it was a very good experience,” Nicolai says.  “I’d always been passionate about theatre, but actually participating in that production made me realize that there was a lot more to the field than I thought there was to explore.”

And he has explored many of them.  He has acted in several main stage productions.  He’s taken classes in direction, set design, lighting, and other subjects.  He ran tech for a senior thesis production.  As a way of “taking a breather,” as he puts it, he assembled a cast of 18 and a crew of five, and he staged and directed a benefit production of a play he wrote called Salmon Pursuit.

It raised more than $700 for a local chapter of the YMCA.  More important, he says, it shifted his focus from acting to directing.  And it showed him at least one of the possibilities for using theatre for the greater good of the community around him.

Nicolai has always been pretty passionate about community service, too.  During his first couple of years at Goucher, he volunteered as a mentor at Lemmel Middle School.  And a three-week intensive course he took on the culture and arts of West Africa, almost on a whim, opened his eyes even wider to the need for more people to put their knowledge and passions to work for positive change in the world.

“On one level, the experience was really exhilarating,” he says of his time in Ghana.  “Everything was so new and different from what I knew back home.  I was hyperaware, and probably romanticizing the culture a little bit, and enjoying all the celebrations and other things we saw.”

But then he started walking through some of the fishing villages and saw another side of life in Ghana.  “I’d never been exposed to that level of poverty before,” he says.  The experience was eye-opening, certainly, but also a little frustrating, Nicolai says.  “You’re there for three weeks.  You can walk through it and see it, but you can’t really do anything about it.”

And that’s why he’s decided to spend a semester in Thailand on a program coordinated through the International Partnership for Service Learning.  He’ll take classes at Payap University, and at the same time he’ll work as a volunteer with community organizations in Chiang Mai.  “The whole idea of the program is reciprocity,” Nicolai says.  “Your academic studies feed your service work, and vice versa.”

Nicolai isn’t sure yet how he’ll extrapolate from these experiences in building his career after Goucher College.  But he does feel his education has prepared him to make further connections between his passions in his life far beyond college.

“One of my goals as a theatre major is to get a better understanding of people in general,” he says.  “I think theatre has done wonders for that.  I’ve become a better listener.  I’ve become a better observer.  And I think that, really, these are the building blocks of the kind of social change that I would like to see.”