<p>During my tour of MIT, I recall the tour guide telling our group that professors and their families live in the dorms with the students? Can anyone comment on how obtrusive or not this is in practice? Are they there for disciplinary reasons or more as mentors and a nice academic environment?</p>
<p>Two faculty members generally live in each dorm – a housemaster and an assistant housemaster. Their function is definitely for mentoring and coordinating fun events for the dorm, rather than for being disciplinarians.</p>
<p>They’re not there to babysit you. At least in my experience, their main purpose is to coordinate dorm events, give free food, and send out emails about important stuff. I occasionally see the housemasters and assistant housemasters of my dorm around, but it’s not like they’re hovering or anything, and it isn’t at all intrusive. </p>
<p>Also, one interesting thing about MIT is that there are no such things as RAs. A lot of dorms have RAs whose job it is to take alcohol away from underage people and enforce rules and stuff. The closest thing MIT has to that is a GRT (graduate resident tutor), who is there more for mentoring purposes, not disciplinary ones.</p>
<p>Yeah, at least in my experience, the housemasters tend to be allies of the students. They obviously can’t endorse explicit rule-breaking, but they are not there to monitor and discipline you. And students get pretty decent representation on the housemaster selection committees.</p>
<p>Just to echo what everyone else said- my housemaster was really awesome, everyone in the dorm totally loves them. Our housemaster’s wife is a famously good cook, and they invite a different floor to come eat a delicious home-cooked dinner with them every month.</p>
<p>Of course, this sort of varies…rumor has it that the housemaster before our current one was somewhat…strict. But that was really just a result of his personality, not his job description- if that makes sense.</p>
<p>If you want to hang out with Housemasters, you may. If not, you don’t even have to see them at all for the entire year. They are present simply as a mentoring function or if you are having administrative difficulties.</p>
<p>In general, you are more likely to go to your GRT (grad student that acts like an RA).</p>
<p>But if you’re concerned about strict enforcement of rules, be assured that MIT has one of the most liberal policies in most dorms compared to other schools. If you don’t hurt anyone else, you’re virtually free to do anything you want. Just keep it to yourself.</p>
<p>Except during CPW. No booze at all.</p>