College of the Pacific

Real Life Learning

In all of its majors and minors, the College provides opportunities for students to work closely with faculty who are masters in their fields not just in the classroom but also through a variety of internships, fieldwork, and research projects.

Whether working with Disney on a public relations project, dealing with foreign policy in Washington, D.C. or helping to catalogue and preserve historical documents at Stockton’s Haggin Museum, internships in the College provide real life experience that provides our students with the opportunity to apply and expand their classroom learning. 

Fieldwork has sent photography students into downtown Stockton to document historic buildings, to the Delta to calculate water chemistry, and into local immigrant communities to study the criminal justice system and its iniquities. 

Student research projects have been as varied as our students’ interests: from protein production to economic modeling of U.S. immigration policy and the gendered iconography of Aunt Jemima advertisements (Student Research).

In every case, these “real life learning” opportunities spark students’ imaginations, embolden their thinking and often set them on a path of intellectual inquiry that helps to shape not only their years at College of the Pacific, but their lives beyond as well.