THE CONCEPT OF PRACTICUM TRAINING. Applied anthropology can best be learned by doing it, so hands-on experience should be an integral part of the training of the contemporary applied anthropologist, either in regular course work, or as a separate internship activity. However, little information about this aspect of the training process has found its way into the literature. Perhaps student contribution to major applied research projects has simply gotten lost in the overall effort when those projects have been reported in journals, monographs, or technical reports; or perhaps student practicum projects are, by nature, too small in scale or too parochial in interest to appeal to a wide readership. Nevertheless, many in the profession have an interest in training programs (see, for example, Leacock, Gonzalez and Kushner 1974; van Willigen 1979), and it would seem that we should pay some attention t o the development and conduct of student practica. An analysis of their role in the training of applied anthropologists is of sufficient interest to override concerns about the presumed relative triviality of their subjects. I hope that this essay will encourage others involved in the training process to share descriptions and analyses of the practicum facet of training programs with the profession at large. The University of South Florida M.A. program in applied anthropology operates on a system; after an initial period during which all students are exposed to a common core of anthropology theory and data, the students sort out into specialty areas (public archeology, urban anthropology, medical anthropology). A minimum of three courses in the specialty track is required. In the medical anthropology track, the first of these courses is in research design and methodology, using as examples case material in the health-care field. The second part of that methodology sequence is a course designated Regional Problems in Medical Anthropology. In this course, the instructor identifies a health-care issue of local significance, and develops a research project which, in alternate years, is a group effort under the aegis of a local health care agency which is concerned with that issue. The major aim of the project development process is for the research t o have a directly applied end-it must d o something (evaluate a program, generate documentation for a needs assesment, etc.) that the agency needs to have done at that time. (See Spicer 1976 and Spicer and Downing 1974 for further discussion of policy relevance in applied anthropological training.) Basic research on a given empirical problem, which can be used somehow, sometime later on is avoided. The principal goal of such a project is to train students in utilizing their methodological skills as applied anthropologists who must consider such factors as available time and money, the political constraints under which the agency operates, and the specific deadlines operative in the real world.