Annette and Roland, the current Associate Housemasters, are leaving Sidney Pacific after their 8 years of wonderful service. Annette has accepted a position at University of Southern California, and before they move to Los Angeles they will be heading to Beijing in August for a one-year sabbatical.  Below is a letter from Annette and Roland to the residents of Sidney-Pacific:

Roland, Annette, Samuel and Joshua with outgoing housemasters Roger and Dottie Mark and members of the 2012 SPEC.

We would like to thank the Sidney-Pacific community for eight wonderful years being associate housemasters. Annette recalls some trepidation starting this ambiguous adventure called housemastering in 2005, while pregnant and on the tenure-track. We are so glad that we threw caution to the wind since as we now preparing to leave MIT, we can say without a doubt that the S-P community here has been the most rewarding experience of our time here at MIT. While most of us can say that our studies/research/work is ostensibly why we came to MIT, it becomes very clear that sharing life with each other, creating a community with you, is the best thing we ever did here.  Another way to put it is that when one makes a major life transition as we are doing now, it can provide a different and valuable vantage point with which to view life.

Joshua participating in the SP paper-airplane competition in Spring 2013. Courtesy of Annette Kim.

This time we are struck by how flat and cold our lives would have been without you, if we had just lived a more “normal” professor life in a private apartment by ourselves. One lesson we take with us is that in order to have a life richer and more extraordinary, trailing with warm memories, invest in relationships and community building such as Sidney-Pacific.

Some favorite memories include:

• Roland honestly trying to memorize all 700 residents’ names our first year!
• Making the kids’ first birthdays a dorm-wide event. Improvising a take on a Korean tradition, we had students take bets on what our babies would choose as symbols of their future (the scholar’s pencil for Joshua and the artist’s brush for Samuel).
• The surprise cake and flowers at this year’s nomination dinner was the best way to celebrate Annette’s tenure!
• Our weekly dinner meetings with SPEC

Annette, Joshua, Roland and Samuel at Samuel’s first birthday party. Courtesy of Annette Kim.

S-P is the only home that Joshua and Samuel have ever known. Don’t all kids have 700 brilliant graduate students from around the world in their home?  They have been able to run up and down S-P’s hallways and find students who will come out to have fun with paper airplane contests, toilet paper fashion designs, epic water fights in the courtyard, and building the most incredible sand castles at the beach that only MIT engineers can do. They have gotten to see more fire trucks at our fire alarms than any toddler could ever hope to see.

We thank you for your kindness, generosity, good humor, and transparency. We will always think of you fondly and hope you will stay in touch so that we can continue to share life with you.

By Annette M. Kim and Roland Tang, outgoing associate housemasters