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Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship

We are a dedicated institute for student entrepreneurs across campus and beyond. We aim to maximize your success by fostering your entrepreneurial mindset, promote inter-disciplinary collaboration and provide support for the creation and development of your new ventures. Jumpstart your ideas and get involved today!

Tune in for excitement!

Passion. Potential. Pitches. Don't miss any of the 2025 New Venture Challenge excitement.

Tune in Friday, April 11 at 1 p.m. for great ideas and fierce competition. Then, join the judges, mentors, spectators and teams as they see who is going home with thousands of dollars in venture financing. The awards broadcast begins at 6:30 p.m. and one team will walk away as the overall best venture. 

Start your entrepreneurial journey

Central Michigan University’s College of Business Administration is the home of the Isabella Bank Institute for Entrepreneurship and the first Department of Entrepreneurship in the state of Michigan. We are a student-centric hub where experiential, curricular, and external entrepreneurial opportunities intersect.

Our mission is to maximize student success by fostering a campus-wide entrepreneurial mindset that promotes inter-disciplinary collaboration and the creation of new ventures.

We aim to create innovative programming, boost cross-campus and ecosystem collaboration and provide a comprehensive mentoring program.

Our institute provides extracurricular opportunities and is open to all undergraduate and graduate CMU students.

Student opportunities

  • Meet experienced alumni, faculty, entrepreneurs, investors, and other business and political leaders.
  • Learn practical skills, innovative thinking, and connect with mentors and entrepreneurial resources.
  • Attend skill-building workshops and compete in pitch competitions and Hackathons.
  • Take part in special scholarship programs and travel experiences.
  • Pitch your venture at our signature New Venture Challenge event and compete for up to $20,000 in cash awards.

      Find your path

      Are you interested in becoming an entrepreneur?

      Every journey is unique. Explore the opportunities that interest you.

      The Shining connection in LGBTQ+ identity and horror

      by Henry Heller

      Thomas Delor Jr., a Master’s student studying Film Theory and Criticism, researched the relationship between LGBTQ+ fans and horror movies. Delor found characters were “central to how my participants connected with horror.”  

      Delor was inspired to research this topic because of his love of horror movies and queer cinema. Delor says, “Not only are these subsets of film some of what I enjoy most, but my enjoyment of these cinematic worlds was enriched by a scholarly perspective as I worked my way through my graduate program and learned more and more about the complex and fascinating way that they intersect.”  

      In Delor’s previous research he found LGBTQ+ people would like to have more complex representations of LGBTQ+ identities in different movie genres. However, horror films have historically featured LGBTQ+ people with intricate storylines. To combine these findings, Delor set out to discover how LGBTQ+ people identify with horror.  

      Delor’s research found that people have a unique relationship with the movies they love and individual feelings about certain topics were all over the map. Delor says, “For example, I found that I had participants who thought horror was getting better at representing queerness mostly because it was becoming more comfortable with representing a variety of ‘out’ queer characters, and I had participants who thought that queer horror may lose some value by normalizing queerness since you also lose the unique pleasure of a monster who is coded as queer or identifying veiled queer signifiers.” 

      Delor also used the data from his research to explore and create a theoretical framework to use in the future to study queer audience engagement with horror media. 

      This story is brought to you by the  Office of Research and Graduate Studies.

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