Recently, the Fuping County Party Committee and People's Government of Hebei Province sent a letter of appreciation to the School of Agricultural Economics and Rural Development (SARD) at Renmin University of China (RUC), highly praising the school's professional internship team's pragmatic research approach and fruitful outcomes in Fuping County. The "Excellence program in agriculture, rural areas and farmers · Knowledge and Action" internship innovatively adopted a "a model of “local challenges posed, student solutions proposed”" format, focusing on the "agriculture, rural areas, and farmers" theme. It utilized collective professional internships to evaluate students' theoretical learning outcomes. The project was successfully selected as a national demonstration team for the 2024 "Rural Revitalization · Youth Commitment" Program and is a sub-project of SARD's "Excellence program in agriculture, rural areas and farmers" undergraduate training system. In August 2024, all undergraduates of the class of 2021, led by Party Secretary Zeng Bingjian, Vice Dean Zhong Zhen, and other faculty members, conducted a 7-day professional internship in Fuping County, Baoding City, Hebei Province.

Transitioning from classroom to field, and from textbooks to practice, SARD students entered communities and rural areas. Focusing on the "seven major challenges" proposed by Fuping County – cultural and tourism empowerment, quality improvement and branding, fiscal support for agriculture, technological efficiency gains, industrial prosperity, disaster prevention/mitigation, and poverty prevention/income growth – they immersed themselves in Fuping. They continued the tradition of hands-on practice, independently initiating investigations, conducting surveys, and performing research to propose a series of practical solutions. This not only translated classroom knowledge into problem-solving abilities but also demonstrated teaching effectiveness through service to local development. By participating in grassroots governance, they gained a deeper understanding of the mission and responsibility of youth in the new era.

"The purpose of the professional internship," stated Vice Dean Zhong Zhen, "is to immerse students in 1-2 weeks of intensive field research during their third-year summer break, enabling them to deeply understand the real dilemmas and specific challenges facing agricultural and rural modernization. It simultaneously assesses the application of knowledge acquired during the first three years of undergraduate studies, training students to identify, define, articulate, analyze, and solve problems. This achieves comprehensive improvement in 'listening, speaking, reading, and writing' skills and accelerates students' all-round preparation for transitioning from campus to society." He emphasized that this internship used actual local development issues as an examination, requiring students to independently apply their professional knowledge and abilities, serving as a 'practical examination' of their learning over the past three years.

The "Excellence program in agriculture, rural areas and farmers · Knowledge and Action" internship was not only a successful practical teaching exercise but also a profound act of social service. Applying acquired knowledge to address local questions and learning from practice to deepen the study of rural development, SARD will continue to focus on accelerating the goal of building a strong agricultural nation. It remains committed to combining the solution of China's practical problems with the construction of an independent Chinese knowledge system, striving to cultivate high-end talents who "best understand China's agricultural and rural management," and endeavoring to provide a distinctive talent cultivation model with RUC characteristics for comprehensive rural revitalization.