Name: A World-Class Education in Music City, USA: The Vanderbilt Experience with Shane McGuire
Uploaded: 2026-01-15T17:49:23.000Z
Duration: 19 min 39 s
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Welcome to another episode of Breaking Boundaries, the world's premier podcast for international students.

My name is John with the TOEFL program and I'm honored today to be joined by Shane McGuire of Vanderbilt University.

Shane, thanks so much for joining the pod today.

I'm excited to be here and hopefully talk a little bit about life at Vanderbilt.

Vanderbilt is located in beautiful Nashville, Tennessee.

But for prospective students who may not be familiar with Nashville, can you explain a little bit about where it is in the US and what Nashville's like?

I love talking about Nashville, particularly with international students.

I think a lot of times when they're looking at the United States, they're very familiar with east coast cities and sometimes west coast cities.

And they're like, I hear about this Nashville place border, but where is it?

So we're in the southeast part of the United States.

You know, if you were to fly over to the US you'd likely come in through perhaps New York or Boston.

And it's about a two hour flight to sort of our part of the country.

It's a part of the country that's known for being very welcoming, very friendly.

You also get a really nice mix of all four seasons.

Even though it is technically sort of winter in the United States right Now, it is 60 degrees Fahrenheit out here today.

So enjoying a little bit of that sort of spring weather in Nashville.

But Nashville is a city of about 2 million people, a little over 2 million people.

And that's when I read the statistics, you know, a few days ago.

Here is the fastest growing city in the United States.

So with that, there's a lot of excitement as there's like new people moving here from all across the country, all across the world.

It very much has this sort of new city feel to it.

There's always new restaurants and things going up in the city that students can get out and enjoy.

And the Vanderbilt location is perfect because we are literally in the heart of Nashville.

You are a mile and a half or three kilometers from the center of downtown.

So you're literally like just outside of the downtown proper, but

the city is literally right there at your doorstep.

You have this beautiful contained campus, but

then you can kind of walk right off into the city and kind of explore that.

And students definitely Take advantage of that.

I was in Nashville for a wedding a couple years ago and my wife and I stayed in a hotel right by Vandy's campus.

And I almost got lost just sort of walking along.

So it has all the best of that traditional campus experience with the access to the city itself.

that's the part I always talk about the most is like, yes, you have this traditional college campus.

Like when you walk around our campus, you could almost forget that you're in a city.

One of our fun facts, in case you were curious, we talked about having a three to one squirrel to student ratio on campus.

So I always like talking about that because people are like, oh, what is that?

You usually talk about student to faculty ratio.

I'm like, no, we're going to talk about our squirrels.

But then you have the access to a great city right there at your doorstep.

And you don't really have to like drive into the city or take public transportation is literally within walking distance.

I did deep, deep research and I had written down that Vanderbilt has a 7 to 1 student to faculty ratio, which is astonishing.

Yeah, I mean, and I don't want to not highlight our faculty.

I mean, 3 to 1 squirrels is still beating out that ratio just a little bit.

Also a testament to the presence of trees as you referenced.

And Shane, before we talk a little bit more about Vanderbilt, I brought a prop.

I happen to be reading a book on the history of country music called Don't get above youe Raisin.

And Nashville is a central figure in this book because over the last century it's become this melting pot of bluegrass, rockabilly, rock and roll, country music.

And to me it sort of serves as a metaphor for how Vanderbilt's serves international students.

You've got students from more than 70 countries, but

can you describe a little bit the Nashville music scene?

yeah, so the stereotype about Nashville is that it's just country and technically it's the country music capital of the world.

But I like to use the title, like Music City USA because I think that better represents what you find here.

So I think what's unique about it is you have kind of the full range of music here from the live performances.

I mean, you literally have a concert in this city every single night.

Sometimes I'm driving through my neighborhood and someone's just sitting on their front porch just like singing to whoever's around.

Like, it really, truly does ring true of having that music city sort of thing feel to it.

So you have the, the performing side, but then you also have.

And it's not far from campus, you have what's called music row, which is where all these like recording studios are.

And some of them are like in the big buildings.

The first time I drove by it, I expected it to be like this huge corridor of like these huge buildings.

And it's actually just a bunch of like little houses that all have these like fancy recording studios.

Like, I, I almost missed it the first time I, like, I got to the end of it, I was like, did I miss it?

And then you go back and you see all these tiny little signs and the recordings.

So you have the music production aspect of that happening in the city as well.

So almost any place you go in the city, there's a lot of artists that have moved here to like, they're working some job in Nashville, but

part time, they're trying to like make it in their music career as well.

So just by living in the city, you'll probably learn about like the next up and coming artists before they like start to make it big.

It doesn't just have to be country music.

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A World-Class Education in Music City, USA: The Vanderbilt Experience with Shane McGuire

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