Happy National Student Parent Month! This month, the Office of Graduate Education is featuring one graduate student parent per week, highlighting their academic work and parenting journey at MIT. Please check back weekly for more student parent features!
Family: Wife, Amanda, and 9-month-old daughter, Sofia
Degree program: PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering
Years at MIT: Entering 5th year
Fabio Castro is a 5th year PhD student studying Civil and Environmental Engineering. Prior to MIT, he was an engineer and logistics manager at an energy firm in Brazil, and volunteered with Doctors without Borders in South Sudan. He began his program at MIT remotely, and moved to Cambridge three years ago. He and his wife, Amanda, have lived in family housing for three years and welcomed their first child, Sofia, last November.
Finding community at MIT
In anticipation of Sofia’s birth, Fabio and Amanda arranged for Amanda’s parents to come to Cambridge to help them in the early weeks as first-time parents. When these plans unexpectedly fell through, their community in family housing stepped up. For weeks, other MIT families in the Westgate dorm came by to teach them how to care for their newborn, and dropped off meals at their door.
“It’s something I’ll never forget,” Fabio shared. He was touched by these gestures—the support was a huge benefit of choosing to live on campus, and something that would not have happened had he lived in an off-campus apartment.
Fabio truly values the close-knit, special nature of the community of MIT families. He has enjoyed seeing the way the kids in the dorm go to each other’s apartment doors to see if the others are free to play. This diverse, international, and friendly community is a unique place to grow up, and Fabio says he will never live in a better place to raise kids. “It’s a pity she’s too young to remember it,” Fabio said when asked about raising Sofia in the dorm.
Although he will likely graduate when Sofia is only two years old, Fabio does look forward to her growing a little bigger so that she can interact more with the other MIT kids.
Managing school and parenting
While Fabio is in class, Amanda stays home with Sofia and remotely manages her family’s restaurant in Brazil. Her flexible work schedule and ability to simultaneously care for Sofia has allowed Fabio to focus on his PhD program. After classes, he comes home, does household chores, and spends quality time with Sofia when Amanda goes to English language classes offered by the City of Cambridge. Fabio says this arrangement is working well at the moment, but that he is still figuring out how to squeeze in some workouts (with the MIT Brazilian Jiu Jitsu club) during the week.
Before welcoming his daughter, Fabio did not know about the resources MIT offers to students with children and was pleasantly surprised to find out about the family programming, individualized support, parental accommodations, and activities for spouses and partners.
For more information on MIT’s support for students with children, please visit the MIT Grad Families website or contact email@example.com.
Photos by Corban Swain.