Ball State University

Ball State University International Student Insurance

Ball State University, located in Muncie, Indiana, was established in 1918 as the Indiana State Normal School Eastern Division. It was founded when the Ball brothers, a group of five industrialists and co-owners of the Ball Corporation, purchased the recently foreclosed Indiana Normal School and donated the school with its surrounding land to the State of Indiana. It has since grown from a teachers college to a public research university with a yearly enrollment of more than 20,000 and seven academic colleges. The school’s colors are cardinal and white, and its athletic nickname is the cardinals.

On Campus

The campus has several noteworthy features. The Charles W. Brown Planetarium is the largest planetarium in the state of Indiana and receives more than 20,000 visitors per year. It provides free weekly shows to the public and features a rotating schedule of programming. The Donald E. Miller Wildlife Area is a 16.5-acre nature preserve home to nature studies and environmental sciences field experiments. The David Owsley Museum of Art opened in 1935 and displays about 1,000 works ranging from prehistoric tools to Renaissance paintings to modern American decorative art and furniture.

Notable Alumni

Notable Ball State University alumni include David Letterman, namesake of the David Letterman Communication and Media Building, which opened in 2007; cartoonist Jim Davis, creator of the Garfield comic strip; actor Doug Jones; and Angela Ahrendts, former CEO of Burberry and senior vice president of retail for Apple.