Experience Type vs. Experiences

Understanding Experience Types and Experiences

When creating and managing student engagement opportunities in Involve, it’s important to understand the difference between experience types and experiences. They complement each other to create meaningful involvement pathways for your students.

Experience Type	Experiences

What Are Experience Types?

Experience types are the categories or frameworks you create to define how students can engage with your institution. Think of them as templates or containers that outline the purpose of the experience.

• Leadership, Service, Internships, Research, Orientation, First Year Bucket List

Experience types are the blueprints that set the structure and expectations for a particular kind of involvement opportunity.

What Are Experiences?

An experience is an individual instance of an experience type—something that a student actually participates in or submits for approval. For example:

• The experience type might be “Community Service.”

• The experience would be “Volunteering at the local food bank for 20 hours.”

Each experience connects back to a type, allowing institutions to gather consistent data while students personalize their involvement journey.

Example in Action

Let’s say your institution wants to track leadership development:

• Experience Type: Leadership Development

  • Learning outcomes: Communication, teamwork, decision-making

• Experiences:

  • “Resident Assistant Role”

  • “Student Government Participation”

  • “Peer Mentor Program”

Each of these experiences contributes to the overall leadership development data, tied back to the single “Leadership Development” experience type.