Higher Education providers require various working definitions of the student cohorts they support. Inherent challenges exist where the focus is on developing holistic student experiences at particular points along the undergraduate journey. The differentiation of year level experiences is common in student experience literature yet characterising a year level can be “muddied” by academic level, the use of colloquial descriptors and the exclusion of some student populations in the experience literature. This paper provides practical examples for scholarly reporting of clearly articulated, sufficiently contextualised descriptors using a second-year student exemplar. It also explores the identification of “muddy in the middle” students from the perspective of a second-year undergraduate Bachelor of Science student and describes a successful strategy to locate and target effective support of students in the muddy middle.