Achieving Balance

Introduction
There’s something very unique about Vanderbilt’s balance that it finds between you know work hard and play hard and that can involve alchahol on the weekends and doesn’t have to involve alchahol on the weekends cause you have a great city such as Nashville to – that was another big factor for me is being in a small city with a big city feel and when you’re on campus you’ll look around and you could be anywhere in the world. And then you have downtown Nashville all a mile away.

Campus Life and Social Life
You have this stereotype called the “Vandy Girl” or the “Vandy Guy” which holds true in some cases but I think that stereotype is gonna hold true anywhere you go. So you have people that are gonna come down from the North and their gonna pop their collars and try to fit into this Southern culture when half the time they don’t really need to do that, And then you have a lot of awesome girls from everywhere else in the country. I think it’s just a really great diversity of thought and diversity of culture that comes together and forms Vanderbilt. You see relationships start from the very beginning and then you see people that get into relationships beginning second semester – I would say the majority of my friends are not – are single and enjoying meeting new people and trying new experiences and learning from different perspectives but I think Spring time is here and love is in the air at the same time so you really do see these relationships starting, people going out on dates more and I think that’s just a part of that adjustment process. Advertisement
Academics
Now I’m taking several introduction courses, hopefully I’ll be done with that buy next semester actually and then I really got to start focusing on what I want to major in outside of HOD which is what my major is right now cause a lot of people will take Human Organizational Development and really you can apply that to any career path so they’ll supplement that with something a little more specific, so that’s where I am right now.
Class sizes vary – I’m in a couple of lets see 100, 200 people size classes and then I’m actually in three classes where its about 10 to 15 people so you have professors that are here because their awesome professors and their doing a great job trying to help freshman you know ease that balance being in transition form high School to college and then you have you’re bigger lecture classes where you’re gonna get less 1 on 1 attention but typically there very renowned professors where you’ll learn a lot from.

Student Body
A huge part of the social life is definitely the Greek scene but if that’s not you’re thing you also have the city of Nashville and myriad opportunities elsewhere. So I’m in a fraternity but it’s very easy to have a last with my brothers and having parties, doing things like that but last week I spent probably 5 out of 7 days downtown at a conference all week and going to concerts so that’s another balance that Vanderbilt really finds. It’s a tradition at Vanderbilt for all the different fraternities to take dates to the football games; I wasn’t in a fraternity last semester so I don’t think I took a date to more than one game. So you have people that are dressed up in coat and ties and girls in their sun dresses and you have people that are in shorts and T-shits and others that are painted up in their gold and black so you have a little bit of everything. I think school spirit is alive, it just comes and goes, especially like basketball season this year was a blast. School spirit’s gonna be strong when our sports teams are gonna be doing what they need to do but it just kind of depends on the sport season and when were rallying behind who.

In Closing...
It’s very expensive. Generally speaking, Vanderbilt finds a way to get the students that they want to come here with their financial aid department, whether it be merit scholarships or need based. At Vanderbilt you have 6000 undergrad and about 4 or 5,000 graduate. That’s a balance you can’t find anywhere else. I think people are more and more so wanting. The acceptance rate is getting smaller and smaller. The same time when you come here it really depends on what course of study you decide to choose as to how difficult your academics are gonna be. You’re gonna go pre med or engineering you’re gonna have a more difficult 4 years than your typical arts and science student or Peabody student, so a lot of that is what you want out of college, how difficult you want it to be, because there’s so much freedom in the classes that you get to choose in the major you decide to pursue. There’s definitely a political influence here and you see that in students writing into the newspaper or holding debates but my experience has been your gonna have conservatives and liberals and they find a good balance here.