Packways: Learning by Doing

Packways: Learning by Doing is NC State’s initiative to strengthen the quality, intentionality and student participation of High-Impact Experiences (HIEs) across the university. Packways builds the infrastructure, professional development ecosystem, and assessment culture needed to ensure that all NC State students can participate in deep, structured experiential learning and graduate able to articulate what they have gained.

Packways pursues three goals:

• Participation: Increase student participation in high-quality High-Impact Experiences.
• Articulation: Improve students’ ability to “notice, name, and narrate” the value of these experiences, so they can demonstrate their readiness for what comes next.
• Culture: Strengthen a universitywide culture of high-impact experiential learning.

The Packways Framework

Packways is grounded in a research-based definition of what makes an experiential learning opportunity genuinely high-impact. Programs across NC State’s colleges and units earn the Packways Recognized HIE designation through a formal review against the Packways HIE Rubric, which evaluates six essential elements:

• Sustained Engagement – students invest meaningful time and effort over an extended period.
• Immersive Experiential Learning – the experience connects academic preparation to authentic professional, community or research contexts.
• Mentorship and Collaboration – students work with and learn from experienced practitioners, faculty/staff or peers.
• Facilitated Connections – students are supported in linking their experience to broader academic and career goals.
• Structured Critical Reflection – intentional reflection activities help students process and articulate what they are learning.
• Communicating Competencies – students develop the ability to translate their experience into language that conveys professional readiness.

This framework draws on decades of scholarship in experiential education, including George Kuh’s foundational High-Impact Practices research, and aligns with the National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) career readiness competencies that employers use to evaluate graduate preparedness.

Alignment with University Priorities

NC State’s strategic plan, Wolfpack 2030: Powering the Extraordinary, commits the university to empowering students for a lifetime of success and impact. In developing Packways: Learning by Doing, NC State recognized that although it offers students a rich array of high-impact experiences, there was an opportunity to improve communication of their value, provide guidance for access, embed structured critical reflection and systematically track participation. Institutional data underscored the need: while nearly all entering students identify reflection as an important skill, only 56 percent of seniors felt their education strongly contributed to it, and just one-third of alumni rated NC State’s career preparation as excellent. Packways responds by ensuring students can articulate the value of their experiences and translate the skills gained into professional preparedness they can demonstrate to employers, graduate programs and other stakeholders.

Where We Are

As Packways enters its third year, it has moved from exploration and foundation-building to functioning at scale and expanding:

• 125+ Packways Recognized HIE programs across NC State’s colleges and units, spanning undergraduate research, internship courses, service-learning, entrepreneurship challenges, mentored leadership programs and community-engaged capstones.
• Statistically significant student growth across all eight NACE career readiness competencies among HIE participants, with the strongest gains in Career and Self-Development and Communication.
• A professional development ecosystem for HIE program leaders, including workshops, a community of practice and a student employer retreat.
• A digital badging system through Credly recognizing faculty/staff expertise in high-impact experiential learning.
• LinkedIn Certificates and resources guiding students in sharing their HIE experiences and its career implications.
• A first-of-its-kind graduate student survey examining high-impact professional development experiences across all colleges.

Who We Are

RS

Rebecca Sanchez

Director, Quality Enhancement Plan

919-515-9768 rpsanche@ncsu.edu

FC

Fashaad Crawford

Senior Vice Provost for Institutional Effectiveness

919.513.3743 flcrawfo@ncsu.edu

ME

Melissa Edwards Smith

Packways Learning and Development Lead and Director of Education and Campus Engagement, Office of Equal Opportunity

919.513.3836 mmedward@ncsu.edu