‘Epicenter’ for medical students and immersive learners in Muncie

The walls of Maplewood Guest House are etched with history. Photos of Ball State’s original first family hang on the walls — carefully dusted and fawned over by inquisitive visitors — serve as a reminder to residents who reap the benefit of the family’s generosity to do good by the community.

The house, with its still fully-functioning original fireplace, now serves as a residential hub for third and fourth-year students — a collaboration between Indiana University (IU) School of Medicine and Ball State for students earning a medical degree or working on a clerkship in East Central Indiana, according to the Guest House’s information page.

Guest House manager David Martin was at the forefront of the collaboration project when he took on the residential community’s first-ever management role.

Although Martin stepped into the position in August 2017, there were discussions between Ball Brothers Foundation, Ball State University, Indiana University and IU School of Medicine about the collaborative housing effort in the year prior.

“The discussions were to find out whether they could use the space, which had been vacated by Ardahl Corporation,” Martin said. “They wanted to find use for this building that would help the community.”

The solution was to make the housing complex a so-called “epicenter” for medical students and provide immersive learning opportunities.

Martin came to Maplewood Guest House having worked as an adjunct professor and in Ball State’s Housing and Dining departments for 15 years prior.

When it came time to manage the Maplewood property, he applied policies and procedures from the university’s housing models because he didn’t “need to reinvent the wheel.”

He also worked with Ball State property management and hospitality students to figure out how to best maintain the building’s antiquarian structure and honor the Ball Brothers’ legacy.

Beyond the general upkeep of the Guest House, such as through inventory monitoring and spreadsheet bookkeeping, there is a responsibility to make sure students know about the opportunities the property offers. Martin and his team of Ball State immersive learning students knew this.

“We created basically everything here in 2017, everything you can think of to successfully run a business, including social media. I found it really exciting to start the building from the ground up, so to speak,” Martin said, noting that the house itself was built in 1898.

Martin remembered a February 2020 phone call, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, from the IU School of Medicine, urging all students to go home. Despite the closure of surrounding universities, the housing complex remained open and maintained “almost the majority of the time that COVID was here,” he said.

Even so, the building was vacant for several months before students returned to their medical practice rotations — a discouraging and stark reminder of how young and exciting the collaboration project had been at that time.

Muncie was the ideal localized space for the undertaking that was Maplewood Guest House.

According to Optimus Primary, which partners with the Ball Brothers Foundation, “Muncie has something no other city in Indiana has: an array of healthcare anchor institutions located in close proximity to one another, making it one of the leading physician training centers in the state.”

This is a pipeline program for medical professionals, in partnership with the Ball Brothers Foundation.

The city has a reputation of consistently being within the top five best destinations to study medicine in the state, largely because of IU Ball Memorial Hospital, which is three minutes from Ball State and IU School of Medicine.

“Muncie was number nine in a location, as in terms of locations that students wanted to come to to serve their rotation at the hospital. [By 2017], the city became number two in the state outside of Indianapolis. We are number two in the location of destination students want to come to [when they] do their clerkship,” Martin said.

To help drive those numbers, Martin enforced the residential community to foster a welcoming environment for all students who pass through its doors, which is especially important because students are only actively living in the community for only three to four weeks at a time while in rotation.

“One of the things that we’ve developed is programming and events for medical students. Every week, on a Wednesday or Thursday, we have a welcome event or some type of event that brings them all together,” he said.

These events feature popcorn, pizza and “provide a chance for students to connect,” something particularly important to Martin. For Martin, his favorite part of the job is connecting with students and talking with them about their future goals.

The bonding opportunities between IU and Ball State students simultaneously debunk a common misconception, the rivalry between Ball State and Indiana University.

“IU School of Medicine isn’t a competitor of Ball State. Indiana University may be, but IU School of Medicine isn’t,” Martin said. “The partnership has provided several opportunities for research between me and other faculty members. We were given the Housing Impact Award from the Housing Education and Research Association. That was for some of our work with immersive learning with Ball State students.”

Contact Katherine Hill via email at [email protected].