Photo contributed by Seth Sullivant.

Submitted by Seth Sullivant.

I am a professor of mathematics at NCSU. I have been at State for about 10 years. I teach a combination of graduate classes and senior-level undergraduate classes in mathematics. My area of specialty is applications of algebra, specifically in biology and statistics.

I went to the University of California at Berkeley for both my undergraduate and graduate degrees. While Berkeley is an extremely liberal and accepting place, I still found the coming out process to be stressful. Each year during LGBT history month, the school newspaper would publish an “Out List” of professors and students who openly identified at LGBT.

I always found it thrilling to see that there were so many people on campus who were comfortable being out, and this really helped me in my coming out process. That’s part of the reason I participate in the GLBT Faculty and Staff Network and the GLBT Advocate Program at NCSU: to repay the favor of those who did the hard work of coming out before me.