I came to Seoul from Canada in the early 2000s with a background in political science and policy, a lot of opinions about communication, and a teaching job I had not entirely planned on keeping.

I am still here.

What started as ESL instruction became something considerably more interesting over time. I moved from writing and language into business communication, then into marketing and branding, then into AI ethics and technology policy. I have delivered corporate communication workshops for Korean companies and chaebols, and worked in front of cameras and microphones as a TV and radio contributor — enough time on both sides of the briefing room to understand what separates communication that lands from communication that merely happens.

Along the way I also worked in marketing for a startup, got involved in art show curation, event curation, DJing, and promotions — the kind of work that teaches you very quickly how attention works, how audiences are built, and what it actually takes to make people show up and stay. I contributed to metaverse development projects, spent real time understanding the tokenomics of companies operating in that space, and built pitches for investor audiences, which is a fast and unforgiving education in what communication actually has to do when stakes are high and patience is short.

The throughline across all of it was always the same question: how do people actually make themselves understood, and why does that so rarely happen by accident?

I now teach at the Center for Creative Convergence Education at Hanyang University in Seoul, where I have been faculty for 18 years. My students are a mix of Koreans and international students — two groups navigating the same professional world from very different starting points, with different assumptions about hierarchy, directness, and what it means to speak with authority. Understanding what each group actually faces, not just what the textbook says they should do, shapes everything about how I teach.

My current courses are Multimedia Marketing and Content Design, English Writing with Multimedia, English Career Communications, Strategic Personal Branding, Global Business Communication for Impact, and Technology and AI: Utopia or Dystopia? — a course that asks students to think rigorously about who benefits when systems change and who gets left outside the frame.

Living and working in Korea for twenty-four years shapes how you see professional communication in ways that are hard to fully describe from outside it. Hierarchy is real. Silence means something. Trust is built differently here than in North America or Western Europe, and if you do not understand that, your communication strategy is already broken before you write the first word.

I teach mostly international students, which means I spend a lot of time at the intersection of different cultural assumptions about directness, authority, and what it means to present yourself professionally. That has been one of the best educations I could have asked for.

Seoul has also given me a perspective on nightlife, urban culture, and consumer behavior that feeds directly into the marketing and branding work I do. The Seoul Side section of this blog exists because some of the most useful data about how people make decisions, how trust is built in commercial spaces, and how identity works in practice comes from watching how a city like Seoul organizes its after-dark economy.

Most career and communication advice is either generic enough to apply to everyone or specific enough to apply to no one. It prioritizes looking correct over being useful. It optimizes for the interview performance rather than the actual competence underneath it.

This site is built for people who want the thinking, not just the template. The frameworks I write about here are the same ones I use in my courses, stress-tested over years of classroom instruction with students who will tell you directly when something does not hold up. They are built to transfer, which means they should work in a real job interview, a real pitch meeting, and a real career decision, not just in a workshop where everyone is being polite.

If you are a student preparing to enter the job market, a professional navigating a pivot, or a team that needs its communication to do more actual work, this is the right place to start.