Undergraduate Residential Experience

Elementary students from one of the poorest large cities in the nation are dreaming big about college, thanks to twin brothers from their hometown and Vanderbilt Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos. Read More

When Deya Maldas signed up to be a tutor at the Boys & Girls Clubs of Middle Tennessee, she didn’t know she was about to have the most transformative experience of her freshman year. Read More

Sam Reilly does some of his best thinking when he’s out for a run with his Vanderbilt cross-country teammates. It is one of the rare moments in his busy schedule when he can stretch his mind along with his legs. Read More

Sam Hoskins has spent the last four years living on The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons. From his introduction to the residential community as a first-year student in Gillette House to his last three years as a resident adviser in North House, Hoskins says The Ingram Commons has played a significant role in his journey of self-discovery. Read More

Michaela Novakovic’s majors take her from the grand to the microscopic on a daily basis. The Sorrento, Florida, native and Blair School of Music senior is a double major in harp and molecular and cellular biology. Read More

In his four years at Vanderbilt, Connor D. Henderson has become a strong advocate for expanded campus space and resources for student productions. Some of his favorite memories are of cultural showcases by the Vanderbilt performing arts community filled with music, dance and food. Read More

School of Engineering senior Gabrielle Tate—Gabbey to her friends—has the drive it takes to make U.S. automakers take notice. Read More

The Writers-in-Residence program at The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons mixes students from Vanderbilt’s highly regarded MFA creative writing program with students from the university’s first-year living and learning community to explore fiction and poetry. Read More

On Leap Day—Feb. 29—Blair School of Music senior Jack Coen took a leap of faith. That night Coen, a composition and theory major, premiered his capstone project "Folk and Flora"—a song cycle based on flowers and how people relate to them—in Sarratt Cinema to a full house. Read More

Growing up in small-town Kentucky, Safiah Hassan longed to live in a larger city with a diverse population. After coming to Vanderbilt, she made seeking out diverse communities a hallmark of her university experience. Read More

There’s the Pranjal Gupta dressed in kurta and pyjama, his feet keeping time with an impossibly fast Indian dance tune. And then there’s the Pranjal Gupta in a lab coat, peering through glasses at data on how children with autism integrate sight and sound. Read More

Like many little girls, Eunice Jun was a ballerina growing up. But by the time the Los Angeles native arrived at Vanderbilt four years ago, she had traded in her toe shoes to cultivate twin interests in graphic design and technology, pursuing double majors in cognitive studies at Peabody College and computer science at the School of Engineering. Read More

For Ariel Helms, a genealogy search when she was young revealed a long-kept secret: Her ancestors were Cherokee Native Americans. Read More

For Rani Banjarian, the summer of 2006 was the defining moment of his young life. For a month that summer, artillery and airstrikes were a daily occurrence as the unrest between his home country of Lebanon and neighboring Israel grew into the July War. Read More

First-year students will not be the only new faces at The Martha Rivers Ingram Commons this fall. Four new faculty heads of house have signed on to live in the first-year student community and help further its mission of easing the transition to university life and extending learning outside the classroom. Read More

Vanderbilt is the 24th best university for African American students, say "Money" and "Essence" magazines. Read More

Hundreds of Vanderbilt students gathered on Alumni Lawn April 9 for the university’s annual commemoration of Holi, the Hindu color festival, which celebrates the arrival of spring. Read More

Vanderbilt has led a national drive to ensure that academic achievements, community service and hard work—not ability to pay—determine a student’s path to higher education, writes Chancellor Nicholas S. Zeppos in an opinion piece March 5. Read More

Meet Rama Kumaran, a sophomore who was the winner of the National Flute Association’s Young Artist Competition this summer and was featured on National Public Radio’s “From the Top” series at age 16. He talks Harry Potter fan fiction, his strategies to connect with an audience and what drew him… Read More

Vanderbilt has joined the Consortium for Advanced Studies Abroad with the goal of establishing high-quality study abroad programs. Read More