College of the Pacific

Real Life Learning

“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 the College of the Pacific, but their lives beyond as well.

In all of its majors and minors, the College provides opportunities for students to acquire practical skills and knowledge 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on a public relations project, dealing with foreign policy in Washington, D.C. or helping to catalogue and preserve historical documents at Stockton’s Haggin Museum, internships through the College offer real life experience that allows our students to apply and expand their classroom learning.

Fieldwork assignments have included sending 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 inequities.

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).