ABSTRACT
The skills needed to be an effective educator can have significant overlap with the lessons gained from coming out as a gay man in suburban Utah. In this chapter, I share my path to becoming a chemical engineering professor while navigating the complexities of being queer in STEM. I describe how those successes and failures have been used to inform my teaching and support incorporation of evidence-based pedagogy. Those queer experiences have been used to help me, a person with very little natural teaching talent, to become recognized as a particularly effective engineering educator, from the departmental to the national level, and I hope to convey to the reader those lessons in this chapter.
