For the past two years, Larry McMillian ’23 has been living a double life. He’s a student who loved playing baseball until he found his interests expanding at Guilford.

Beginning in his sophomore year, he alternated between two disparate worlds, at turns a Cyber and Network Security major, and a hush-hush computer programming intern for the National Security Agency.

He studied software and learned about memory safe languages, code-hardening defenses and operating system configurations at Guilford. Then he took those skills to the NSA, the branch of the Defense Department that operates the largest electronic surveillance capability in the world.

Over time, he found himself dreaming less often about spraying line drives across an outfield and more about safeguarding a computer system. "There’s just something about (programming) I feel comfortable with,” says Larry, who skipped the 2021 fall semester at Guilford when the NSA offered him an internship in Ft. Meade, Md.

He came back to Guilford in the spring of 2022 to resume his education and, of course, baseball, trading in dress clothes from his internship and slipping back into his joggers and slides for his life as a student-athlete. Last summer he was back in Ft. Meade, programming again for the NSA.

Late last fall, the NSA offered him a full-time job after graduating. He quickly accepted. "It feels good to work hard for something and then get it," says Larry. “I never thought I’d be so into what I’ll be doing, but I love it.”

Shifting interests

Larry didn't start out wanting to be a computer programmer. Instead he would parlay his childhood love of Legos into an Engineering degree at N.C. A&T State University, a Division I program just down the road. He’d even help pay for college with a baseball scholarship. Big school, big plans.

Except those plans blew up months before Larry’s high school senior year when he injured his shoulder and couldn’t compete at an A&T summer baseball camp. There was no scholarship, which meant Larry couldn’t afford A&T.

These days Larry smiles telling his story because, well, let’s be honest. There’s a lot to smile about after drawing up new dreams.

As far back as third grade, Larry remembers being attracted to computers. He was the student elementary school classmates relied on to get past those oh-so-boring educational websites in the school library for the fun (read: zero learning) games. “Nothing to it,” says Larry, who chose Guilford after receiving a J. Floyd “Pete” Moore ‘39 Scholarship.

Computer programmers pride themselves on logic. They’re constantly in pursuit of neat, compact and elegant solutions to the most complex of problems. Larry says he first saw glimpses of his ability in fourth grade, sitting at the family’s kitchen table with his mother after bombing a math test on order of operations.

You remember the order of operations and the acronym PEMDAS — parentheses, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction — your math teacher drilled into your head?

Larry felt overwhelmed staring at every tangled math problem on the table.

Valdenia McMillian sat her son down and the two of them untangled the problems, one by one. “I was looking at the whole test and just trying to get it done, but my mom showed me how to break down a bigger problem into smaller problems,” he says.

That’s when it hit Larry. Sometimes those strategies for solving a math problem apply to life, too. That’s how he got past playing Division I baseball, how he applied for the NSA internship. How he managed to hold his own at NSA surrounded by other interns from Maryland and UC-Berkeley and Harvard. How he juggled everything in his life — work, baseball, school and relationships — to graduate next month with honors and a job offer.

Ellis Stokes ’20 plays baseball with Larry, first at Dudley High School in Greensboro and now at Guilford. "Larry shows me and others what we can do,” says Ellis. “He’s accomplished so much for his age and he’s still got more to go.”

Larry doesn’t understand the fuss. “It sounds like a lot but it’s not if you break it down,” he says. “That’s what I do when I have a lot of things going on in my life. I try to look at a problem in pieces of what I can solve individually before I put it all back together to formulate a solution. When I break things down, life’s not so overwhelming.”

That same way of thinking goes into Larry’s work with the NSA, which collects electronic intelligence communications and makes and breaks codes. If you’re looking for more insight into what Larry’s new job will be, you can stop reading here. Larry speaks softly — so softly that you sometimes have to lean in to hear what he is saying.

He's even harder to hear when he talks about his work at an intelligence gathering facility, one that, starting at the main security gate on the perimeter of the NSA, has four more check points before Larry can sit down at his desk and go to work. His phone must stay in his car.

But back to the job. “Let’s just say the work I've done so far will automate processes that will make a very tedious and complex job easy to complete with a click of a button,” he says.

Larry appreciates other buttons Guilford has clicked for him. “Guilford’s activated a sense of advocacy in me I didn’t know I have,” he says. “When I see something wrong, I say something's wrong. Whether it's me or any of my friends, we go after it. If something doesn't add up, it means the math is wrong and we need to fix it.”

He appreciates his four years at Guilford especially as it is coming to an end. Which is why, with graduation so close, Larry has mixed feelings on leaving. On one hand he’ll miss Guilford. On the other, he’s looking forward to his new life, where he will pull on a collared shirt and dress shoes, sliding back into that other mysterious life — when, like most people as Monday rolls around, he's due back at work.