We recently interviewed longtime SabbaticalHomes.com member and Harvard University educator Katherine Merseth. She has been called an “Academic Entrepreneur” for her innovative research and teaching methods over her 40+ year career in education.
Having grown up in a family who worked and traveled internationally, her perspective on education has always been global. During college, she spent summers with different service groups in Honduras and Nigeria. Her time in Honduras was spent building school desks for a group called “Cornell in Honduras.” In Nigeria, she worked with “Operations Crossroads Africa” building a water purification system and a health-focused model market. Post-graduation, she thoroughly enjoyed her first year of teaching in Kingston, Jamaica. She has combined her love of travel and passion for education throughout her successful career.
When we met, our conversation ranged from her professional accomplishments, philosophies on teaching and how our website has been a resource for years in finding like-minded tenants for her home.
Related: Katherine Merseth, Ed.D.
Finding Trusted Tenants for Home Sharing
Katherine has been a member of SabbaticalHomes.com since 2006. She uses the website every year to post a third-floor space in her home, saying “how incredibly valuable the service is. Busy people don’t have time to fuss around with different [web]sites and descriptions.”
As an academic, she enjoys having other academics stay in the space and enjoys not having an empty home when she is traveling. She interacts with her tenants, but she prefers her renters to have a sense of independence, to be “people with an academic purpose for being in the area.” The space they stay in is set up to be very comfortable, with a small kitchenette area and options to use a private entrance or the shared entrance.
Some highlights of her tenants and their specialties in the last few years include: several Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) doctoral candidates, a physicist at UMass Boston, an entrepreneur teaching at Northeastern University and a visiting fellow from Germany working at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.
Katherine is careful to check references and create contracts with her tenants. Although after renting out the space for 18 years, she “can tell pretty quickly how compatible people will be even just from a message.” Red flags for her include if the other member has not read the listing description or if it’s a person who seems like they might require a lot of handholding throughout the process. Her goal is to connect with others who live a “life of the mind” and to help them with a temporary housing solution in a competitive housing market.
Related: Learn More About Home Sharing with SabbaticalHomes.com
Links to: https://www.sabbaticalhomes.com/home-sharing
Being an “Academic Entrepreneur”
Ironically, if someone asks Katherine about her work, her first response is not that she is a longtime Harvard academic focused on education, but that she is a teacher. She likes to say, “Children are 20% of our population and 100% of our future” and her work has always directly supported those who work directly with our future.
