Matthew Hudes, 23, loves meeting new people.
While growing up in Owings Mills, Hudes attended The Park School of Baltimore. After graduating, he continued his education at Tufts University, where he majored in applied math. Currently, he is a Ph.D. student at Johns Hopkins Whiting School of Engineering. This past December, Hudes became a resident of Moishe House Baltimore, where he lives in Upper Fells Point.
What do you plan to do with your Ph.D.?
The hope is to become a professor. It’s awesome to be able to do research and teach. I enjoy being a teaching assistant and whatnot, so hopefully I’ll be able to do that. It is very competitive, and with applied math, you can do a lot of different things. So, I could definitely see myself ending up in the private sector doing research or in a government lab or something like that. The goal is to make it in academia. But, I’m a first year so I’ve got a while to figure that out.
How did you hear about the opportunity to move into the Moishe House?
I had a friend who moved into a Moishe House in Boston, and I went there for a Shabbat dinner. It was really nice. So, I heard all about it through her. Then when I moved [back] to Baltimore, I looked up and found that there was a Moishe House and started going to events and got to know the residents. I had found a sublet for the fall, but then I was looking for housing starting in December and saw that they had an opening and applied.
What do you like about Moishe House?
I was a community building fellow at Tufts. [During] my whole senior year, I was doing community building and so it feels like a very natural transition. Moishe House basically feels like community building, but you have a lot more events. I think it’s been a lot of fun, and I feel like I’ve been able to put a lot of the skills that I started to develop last year to use in a more robust way now. We put on seven events a month. So, we each will be directly in charge of one or two events a month, but for all the other events, we will all go [to] five of the events a month to at least be a supporting role. Other than that, we are directly in charge and so we also have a lot of other responsibilities that we split up between the four of us, like managing our social media or working with our community manager or making Canva [designs] for the events.
What is your favorite part about living in the Moishe House?
My favorite part is definitely the events, when we’re hanging out, and I get to meet a lot of really cool people. I think that my second favorite part is I hosted a Shabbat dinner recently and got to cook a nice big Shabbat dinner, which was actually pretty fun to go out and shop and cook for that many people. It was a fun experience.
When joining a Moishe House, do you have to have a connection to the city?
Not necessarily. I think that it’s helpful. I think that since I grew up here, I have some connections that I can use. I planned an event this month with a local rabbi, Rabbi Joshua Z. Gruenberg at Chizuk Amuno, which I grew up going to. He actually started as a rabbi there after I left for college. I know him and my parents know him, so it was easy. I reached out and was able to do this event called Torah on Tap, where he came down to the Moishe House and we had some pizza, and we learned a little bit of Torah. That was a great event and maybe someone who didn’t grow up here could still do that event, but it would be a little bit more work to search around and find the rabbi and make the introduction. I think that there’s [also] definitely benefits to not having connections and seeing Baltimore for the first time and imagining what you could do here.
Shira Kramer is a freelance writer.
