From the first few days of high school, all the way through four (or six or eight) years of college, teachers, parents and academic advisers all wield a common threat against lackluster students:
The Real World.

No, I'm not talking about the non-stop kegger / pool party portrayed on the MTV show--that, boys and girls, is college life. I'm talking about what comes after college. Work days that begin at 8 a.m., rush hour traffic, two measly weeks of vacation and dress code policies that mean it's time to start shopping on mom and dad's side of the department store.

I'm talking about the working world.

Since more and more universities are making professional internships a requirement for graduation, many students are finding themselves in the working world earlier than ever before. Once an idle threat about a future too distant to be imagined, the real world is now an integral part of undergraduate curriculum. Student-interns often trade summer vacations, paid employment and free time for an early taste of the workplace and the chance to log valuable training for their future careers.

These internships provide terrific networking and resume-enhancing opportunities while allowing students a chance to put their book-smarts to the test. In internships students can, for the first time, answer the age-old academic question: am I ever going to use the stuff I learned in school?

This past summer, one professor decided to put his preaching to practice and see what life was like out there in the "real world."

Rather than a vacation in the surf and sand, Bill Stuart, associate professor of Communication Studies at Longwood University in Farmville, spent six weeks of the summer knee-deep in the working world as a volunteer intern with CRT/tanaka, a Richmond public relations and marketing firm.

"I had never worked for a PR firm before," said the 39-year-old tenured professor. "And that was really a big part of my interest. I wanted to get some agency experience so I would be more broadly informed about the field of public relations so I could teach my students better."

And get agency experience he did.

"No two days look alike," Stuart remarked about a life in a PR firm. "I think the most surprising thing was the pace: balancing the needs of so many clients and when something happens that a client needs to get into a news cycle you have to re-shift your priorities for the day. Just the diversity of things that everybody in the agency did on a day-to-day basis certainly was eye-opening to me."

Though Stuart had helped area businesses work on public relations strategies in the past, his formal background was in organizational and strategic communication. When PR classes were added to Longwood's course offerings under a departmental curriculum revision, Stuart embraced the challenge and decided to bone up on his skills. He spent six weeks and long days beside CRT/tanaka's seasoned staff working on national campaigns and, toward to the end of his internship, garnered enough skills and talent to warrant some small financial compensation.

But what about that age-old question about using classroom knowledge? According to Christian Munson, account supervisor with CRT/tanaka, it was Stuart providing insight to them about textbook communication approaches, though Stuart says he was the one doing the learning.

"I learned a lot that I'm taking into my other classes that I teach," he said. "There are a ton of things that I'm doing differently this fall than last fall. The most significant thing that I came away with [was] the understanding of agency life: how business gets into an agency, the lifecycle of a campaign or a project, to understand how clients have needs that evolve over time. Those are things that aren't in a textbook anywhere and you wouldn't know it without going in and seeing it happen and seeing how the processes interact to meet the needs of clients."

But don't look for Stuart to be packing his bags and leaving academia anytime soon.

"I'm pretty happy at Longwood. We're doing some exciting things here. I'm happy to have the experience and if [CRT/tanaka] wants to have me back again next summer, I'm happy to do it, but right now I'm back at job one, which is being in the classroom."

And for those students getting ready for their own sample of a "real world" internship, professor Stuart has some advice.

"Seek out as much responsibility as [you] can handle and still do a good job. Internships are the best way for students to develop a case that they have the skills to get a permanent job after graduation. And a lot of the time those jobs come from their internship experiences - either with the company or contacts that they made."