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Aaron Nicol, who was the captain of both the track and cross country teams and president of the peer tutoring club during his senior year of high school, will be graduating from Northland Preparatory Academy on Thursday. 

Nicol has attended NPA since the sixth grade and said he enjoys the close-knit community developed at the school. During the annual senior parade, he said he’d always look for students he hadn’t met -- which was uncommon as NPA’s Class of 2025 has about 60 students.

“Everybody knows each other’s names and what they do,� he said. “It’s nice to have this community in such a small school where you can go to anybody."

His extracurricular leadership positions have also helped Nicol get to know his peers.

“As the team captain, everybody will look up to me and go to me and ask [questions]," he said as an example.

He added: "It’s helped me be able to talk to everybody on the team rather than just having a group.�

He’s been in track and field all four years of high school. He also tried out several other sports after there weren’t enough players for a tennis team (Nicol’s first choice to play), including basketball and baseball. In his last two years of high school, Nicol ran cross country.

He began playing tennis as a middle schooler during the pandemic -- his summer job is teaching youth tennis classes at Forest Highlands.

Nicol is a decathlete on the school’s track and field team, completing a series of 10 events in competitions, which can last two days. He said he picked up the specialty after his friends convinced him to run a 5K. He was already in jumping and throwing sports for track and field at the time and had some experience in sprinting.

He described decathlons as a “jack of all trades� event, saying it appeals to his enjoyment of learning new things. His favorite event within decathlons is shotput, he said, specifically the event that requires running 2 miles before throwing shotput. The combination of skills required for this meant that sometimes Nicol would be the only athlete completing a particular event.

In addition to his involvement in athletics, Nicol is also president of the peer tutoring club and the treasurer for his school’s National Honors Society.

Since it started four years ago, the peer tutoring club has spent over 3,000 hours helping younger students with their schoolwork. Nicol explained that the club tries to match students with tutors based on the subjects that tutors are most interested in. He helped his friend start the club at NPA and has been a member throughout his high school career. 

Nicol said the friends he’s made (including some he met in online classes during the pandemic) and the chance to work with all kinds of people have been the best part of high school.

“There have been times where I’ve been caught up in my own head and I’ve met somebody that’s really changed my mind and made me a more informed person,� he said. “I think that chance to work with others that might not see totally eye to eye with you gives you great perspective so you can learn how to be a better person.�

After graduating, Nicol plans to move to Milwaukee to study business at Marquette University. Nicol’s mother went to graduate school at Marquette and his older brother attended for undergraduate, so he said he’s already familiar with the campus and ready to cheer on his new school’s basketball team.

“We’ll see where that takes me,� Nicol said of his plans for the future. � ... I think I have a little bit of confidence to know what I want to do, but I’m not sure where that’s going to take me. I know that as I learn more about marketing and about business, I’ll learn more about the aspects of that industry that I’ll want to engage with more and be a part of.�

He said his interest in business first started with high school classes. Currently taking economics with teacher Dustin Kuluris, he said the subject feels both logical and personal to him as it combines math with the parts of social studies looking at human behavior.

Nicol said Kuluris was one of his favorite teachers, describing his teaching style as “very legitimate and matter of fact.� He had Kuluris for his freshman human geography class and is now in his economics and government class.

“I think he develops a good personal connection with students so he can learn what topics in the curriculum they need to learn specifically,� Nicol said.

Updated for correction at 7:55 a.m. May 13.