Mass Professor Promotes Work-Life Balance and is Internet Famous

Karen Cunningham has a 10-month-old daughter and is a graduate student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Obviously, having a little baby and going to grad school simultaneously is no easy feat! But thankfully she has a professor who is trying to make her life a little bit easier. Troy Littleton, who runs a research lab at MIT, put a travel crib in his lab’s office to help Karen. He snapped a photo and threw it up on Twitter. The internet went wild!

The outpouring of appreciation for this professor was completely unexpected! He took a step to support this working student mother with work-life balance. Just because she’s a mom with an infant doesn’t mean she shouldn’t be able to earn her graduate degree! Society should be encouraging this and not make it an impossible task. Troy Littleton popped on Twitter again to thank everyone for their support but he wants to remind everyone who the REAL superhero in this story is:

"Well that little tweet blew up?!? However, I wish people were able to spot the real hero here. It's the graduate student mom, not me. She's amazing to do all she has to with her daughter and still keep up her thesis project research."

According to Good Morning America, Karen said one of the reasons she chose MIT is because she got a really positive response from the biology department when she mentioned she wanted to have a baby while in grad school. Instead of deterring her from this they encouraged it and mentioned all of the perks they offer working moms like campus-based day care. The extra effort from Professor Littleton prompted a conversation that is long overdue regarding the many challenges that working moms face.

The 100 Best Places to Live on the East Coast

LOOK: Here are the 50 best beach towns in America

Every beach town has its share of pluses and minuses, which got us thinking about what makes a beach town the best one to live in. To find out, Stacker consulted data from WalletHub, released June 17, 2020, that compares U.S. beach towns. Ratings are based on six categories: affordability, weather, safety, economy, education and health, and quality of life. The cities ranged in population from 10,000 to 150,000, but they had to have at least one local beach listed on TripAdvisor. Read the full methodology here. From those rankings, we selected the top 50. Readers who live in California and Florida will be unsurprised to learn that many of towns featured here are in one of those two states.

Keep reading to see if your favorite beach town made the cut.