Moving- Part 1: "Where going, Momma?"

Guest post by Susan (John's wife)

Well, there's a reason why John's the LGO fellow and not me... because I think moving to Cambridge is enough of an operations problem for me! Seriously. It really is.

So first, we had to decide on a destination. In the words of our toddler, "Where going, Momma?"
We went back and forth and back and forth (and back and forth) about trying to get on-campus housing or not. We were really torn because we liked the idea of being on-campus with other graduate students and their families and the activities and resources for kids (hello playground right outside my back door!). Not to mention the great cost-savings. But we also liked the idea of moving straight into an apartment and trying to get settled before school started. Finally, after countless hours on housing.mit.edu and more hours on padmapper.com (mostly John doing the hard work there!), we decided to try to minimize the number of moves and move straight into an apartment.

Home to MIT Sloan (only a 12 minute walk!)

This decision was also greatly helped by the fact that there was a list of apartments from LGO '14s and '13s who were leaving. John was able to visit several places during Open House for admits. We are really grateful for all the LGO's who were so helpful during this decision process in sharing their insights with us. John was really helped by an LGO '14 family (Mike and Jamie Chun) who generously hosted him when he visited MIT for Ambassador Day and Interview Fest. (Small world: John and Mike both went to West Point and Jamie and I were both psych majors at Smith College! Also, my maiden name is Chun! No relation though. If we were it would have been a really small world.) It turned out that the Chuns were going to leave for his internship so we'll be moving into their place, which is bittersweet for us because it would have been so much better if we could have been in Cambridge together!

We liked the location of Kendall Square because of the proximity to school. We really like to spend a lot of time together as a family and cutting down on John's commute time will help with that. Being close to campus will also be convenient for when we want to participate in any of the on-campus graduate family activities. We also hope to be able to use our home to welcome others (as the Chuns so generously did with us), so if in the future, you or someone you know is in need of staying somewhere, please think of our home! So we will be paying much higher rent, but we believe that for the reasons mentioned, it is worth it.

After we had an address, planning the operations problem of moving could begin. John is so future-oriented that planning comes so naturally for him. This is obviously a big blessing when it comes to things like planning our move and I am so glad that he is good at it. But sometimes I find myself saying things like, "can we plan what we're going to do next weekend instead of next year?"