Abstract
Extra-curricular activities are designed, organised, and delivered by academic schools, providing structured opportunities for enhancing students’ learning experiences. These events are seen as a value for money extras for students, as they offer additional learning opportunities beyond the structured course. With the increased number of international students studying in UK business schools, we are interested in exploring the relationship between engagement with extra-curricular activities and student experience, precisely, student engagement. The positive student experience can signal the values of a course, and this can be studied and explored through the level of student engagement (Shomotova and Ibrahim, 2025). The extra-curricular activities can be classified into four categories, community building, subject and discipline related, employability related, and internationalisation and cultural exchange related activities. While we should not be assuming that participation in extra-curricular events leads to learning enhancement, we argue the role and function of extra-curricular activities are beyond the student satisfaction metrics. Extra-curricular activities provide the transitional time and space for the students to manage and navigate the liminal experience by exercising their identity work and regulations. This includes the development of emerging professional selves (Kirk et al, 2025), social selves, and maintaining one’s sense of self. This paper will use mixed methods: a questionnaire to explore the relationship between extra-curricular activities and student engagement; semi-structured interviews to investigate how students navigate and manage the experience of liminality and develop their identities through extra-curricular activities. It investigates the process and development of identity work in the contexts of extra-curricular activities.