Mohammed Al-Rasheed and his brother, both freshmen, have never seen snow. When they decided to come to Ball State University from Kuwait, both bought winter jackets.
"I want to build a snowman and to do the angels," Al-Rasheed said.
Being from Kuwait, Al-Rasheed is used to being more active outside than his American college counterparts.
"The people, the way we interact with each other [is different]," Al-Rasheed, a telecommunications major, said. "They hang out, go out and party, and they drink, and we don't do that in Kuwait."
Instead, Al-Rasheed said he and his friends would go camping in the desert, drive all-terrain vehicles and play soccer in their spare time.
This was one of the many differences Al-Rasheed noticed when he came to Ball State as an international student.
Ball State has more than 500 international students coming from 84 countries, Marty Bennett, director of international services, said. Most of Ball State's international students come from East and South Asia. More than half of Ball State's international students come from India, China, Korea, Japan or Taiwan, Bennett said, According to an annual study from the Institute of International Education, these countries are five of the six most popular homes of international students throughout the United States.
Indiana ranked 10th in the United States for the number of international students that chose to go to the state's universities for undergraduate and graduate studies during the 2005-06 school year, according to the study. While the number of international students in the United States remained steady from the 2004-05 school year to the 2005-06 school year, Indiana saw a 6.4 percent increase in the number of students attending its colleges. In total, Indiana had almost 14,000 international student in the 2005-06 school year.
Purdue University reported the most international students in Indiana, and the third most in the country, with 5,540 students. The University of Southern California with 6,881 students and Columbia University with 5,575 students topped the list.
"Engineering is a huge draw for [Purdue]," Bennett said.
According to the same study, engineering is the second most popular field of study for international students in the United States, behind business and management.
Ball State is using more proactive recruitment tactics than in previous years to attract international students, Bennett said. One of the tactics is its recent international programs Web site redesign, which includes video interviews with international students at Ball State in English and in the student's native language.
Also, Ball State, along with other state universities, started participating in live-video college fairs last year. The second live-video college fair will be in February, Bennett said. The Indiana universities will be connecting to advising centers in Egypt, Lybia, Kuwait, Oman and the United Arab Emirates.
"It's produced results already," Bennett said.
Al-Rasheed's mother was at the first live-video college fair Ball State participated in, Bennett said. Both Al-Rasheed's mother and father went to American colleges. Al-Rasheed and his brother both went to American immersion high schools in Kuwait.
"I studied most of my life in American school," Al-Rasheed said. But, the immersion schools do not fully incorporate American culture, he said, and that is something he hoped to learn at Ball State.
Despite his excitement to come to Indiana, Al-Rasheed was also nervous.
"I was more nervous [about] the people and how they would react to us from the Middle East," he said. "I thought that people might be mean."
However, Al-Rasheed's fears were calmed when he started at the university in August.
Usually, international students have family or friends in Indiana, and that is a factor in their decision to come to Ball State, Bennett said. Al-Rasheed is not part of that group, but coming to college with his younger brother Ahmad, a managing information systems major, helped him cope with all of the changes.
The men wanted to go to the same college together, Mohammed Al-Rasheed said.
"So we could help one another," he said.
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