Universities create structured opportunities for students – but what happens in the spaces between?

Universities are very good at creating opportunities for students. Across a single campus, there may be careers programmes, research projects, enterprise schemes, mentoring, student societies, internships, alumni networks and more events than most students could realistically attend.

I’ve become increasingly interested in what happens in between those opportunities.

This isn’t another argument for universities to break down silos, nor a suggestion that careers teams, academics and student experience colleagues aren’t already doing sophisticated work to connect provision and involve students in its design. They are. Co-creation and student agency are well-established ideas in higher education.

I’m interested in something slightly different: what emerges between the things we deliberately design, and whether we pay enough attention to it.

Oddly enough, an internet phenomenon helped me to picture this. I’ve recently become fascinated by the Backrooms, an online phenomenon built around liminal spaces: corridors, waiting areas and other transitional places we normally pass through on our way somewhere else. Strange inspiration for thinking about universities, perhaps. But it made me wonder whether we spend so much time designing the rooms that we overlook what happens in the corridors between them.

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Universities have many excellent “rooms”: the lecture, the careers fair, the mentoring programme, the conference, the research opportunity. Students, however, don’t experience a university as an organisational chart. They move between these spaces. And some of the most interesting things can happen on the journey.

I have lost count of the number of students who have told me that they discovered an opportunity too late, didn’t know where to start, felt overwhelmed by what was available or simply assumed that something wasn’t for them. I hear this particularly from international students, although it is certainly not exclusive to them.

Provision matters, but so do permission, participation and what follows. An opportunity can exist without a student feeling it is really for them.

The spaces I’m talking about aren’t only physical. Some of the most important corridors in university life are institutional, relational or temporal. What happens between an academic department and careers? Between research and practice? Between meeting someone and working with them? Between attending an event and deciding, perhaps for the first time, “I could do something like this myself”?

We invest enormous energy in the visible moments. We organise the conference, recruit the speakers, fill the room and collect the feedback. Then Monday arrives. The institution moves on to the next thing. But the students might not have.

Someone continues a conversation. Three students have an idea. Someone makes an introduction. Another student discovers that they are rather good at something they had never tried before.

I have seen this through the Futures Forum at the London School of Economics, a student-led event bringing together alumni, policymakers, researchers, practitioners and students to explore major challenges facing Africa. The students involved weren’t simply asked to help deliver an event we had already designed. They shaped it. They designed thematic Learning Labs, small-group sessions exploring green industrialisation, health and innovation, trade and integration, and digital futures; they recruited other students with relevant academic and professional expertise; they curated the conversations and helped run the forum. Their involvement continues beyond the event through working groups taking forward ideas from each track and developing them into policy briefs and potential projects.

There is an important distinction here: transaction asks students to help us deliver; agency entrusts students to help determine what gets delivered.

Research on student co-creation supports this, too, linking meaningful student-led work and participation with greater agency, confidence and ownership.

I recognise that loop in practice. Trust someone with something consequential, let them discover that they can do it, and the next opportunity can look rather different.

But there is another kind of opportunity that interests me even more. Through Ubuntu Café, an informal space we created around culture, creativity and conversation, capabilities began surfacing that we hadn’t set out to find: talented photographers, a music producer, a natural moderator, and others with considerable professional and technical skills.

Students began using these skills elsewhere. Photographers, producers, editors, and MCs became our in-house creative talent for subsequent events, while students who revealed strengths in moderation, writing and event organisation went on to take on those roles in other activities.

Someone who had attended an event became responsible for part of the next one. Confidence grew from having been trusted with something real, and in some cases those students began opening doors for others.

That made me think about the distinction between provided opportunity and emergent opportunity.

With provided opportunity, the university already knows what the opportunity is: an internship, a conference, a mentoring programme. Emergent opportunity is messier. A capability becomes visible. Two people meet. A conversation becomes a project. A student spots a gap. Someone creates something nobody had thought to programme.

You cannot timetable that. But you can create better conditions for it to happen.

Universities are very good at designing “rooms”. An opportunity ecosystem asks us to think about the corridors, too. We need to ask: did students who met at an event continue working together? Did anyone move from attendee to contributor? Did any student-led ideas emerge from a workshop? Did previously unrecognised capabilities become visible during an enterprise scheme? Did student conversations during a research project become a commercial venture or a policy contribution? Did one student’s opportunity eventually create an opportunity for somebody else?

These things are hard to capture on an evaluation form. That is the point. The real value of an event might not always be what happened in the room, it might be what became possible because the room existed.

None of this requires another university department, and it doesn’t require us to programme every minute of student life. Most of the ingredients already exist.

The challenge is to become as curious about the spaces between our timetabled opportunities as we are about the events themselves. Thus providing enough architecture to make connections possible, but enough freedom for students to experiment, contribute, take ownership and surprise us.

Perhaps alongside asking what opportunities we are providing students, we should ask two other questions:

What possibilities are we enabling students to discover?

And, after everyone has left the room: What did we set in motion?

Tosin Adebisi is senior programme manager, programme for African Leadership, Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa at the London School of Economics and Political Science.

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