Every field involves fieldwork

When I started reading Auto-Ethnographies, I was confused since the situations described did not seem to be very connected to academia.  I mean, it was fairly interesting to hear about the difficulties of being an outsider and yet also an insider in the studied cultures, but I did not see how these exposés were about the authors' situation in academia.  Then, after reading several chapters of these apparently random travelogues, I realized, with significant help from the essay I was on, that these journeys were part of academia for anthropologists doing ethnography.  This thing called "fieldwork" is a huge part of their discipline.  Fieldwork is where anthropologists get "down and dirty" in their discipline and get experience.  Still, I had difficulty relating to this fieldwork as being part of academia since I am majoring in math and computer science, both fields known for their, shall we say, lack of going outside. 

You may think that fieldwork is a topic too unimportant to consider compared to the weighty themes discussed in the Academic Life class, such as prejudice, ethics, town-gown issues, and so on. I agree that fieldwork is not particularly weighty.  However, it provided a way for me, a science major, to understand humanities majors in a way I had never done before.  In fact, the idea of fieldwork as described above is one of the first deep connections between methodology in the sciences and in the humanities I have seen.  Connecting the humanities and the sciences is one of the weighty issues from class, so I feel fieldwork is a worthy topic. 

In anthropology, students gain a visceral understanding of their field by going abroad as graduate students.  What makes someone viscerally understand math or computer science?  I decided that "fieldwork" in math was the many years of practice with the basic concepts of math in order to gain that mathematical intuition often called mathematical maturity.  That is, in math, "fieldwork" is started in elementary school and continued through college.  In graduate school, you finally use the understanding you have gained from your 16 years of "fieldwork" to probe deeper into the subject.  So, not only is the method of doing fieldwork different between math and anthropology, but also when the fieldwork is done is different.  That is, in math, "fieldwork" is done in an academic setting and must be mastered before further study, rather than being the capstone of academic experience, as in anthropology.

In computer science, again, "fieldwork" is lots of practice with programming, so that one has a gut feeling for what is a good program and how to write it.  However, in computer science, this is usually done through projects outside of class or on the job.  Even in graduate school, as far as I can tell, "fieldwork" is done on one's own, with little direct benefit to school grades or academic prestige other than being able to code faster for projects.  Often really awesome and useful programming projects are not even put on a CV for this reason, despite such projects being the meat of a computer science undergraduate's résumé.  In fact, although it's slowly changing, students who want to be professors are warned against putting programming projects on their CV to avoid giving a bad impression, of what, I still don't know.  That is, in computer science, only the results of "fieldwork" are valued, and the actual process of fieldwork is both outside of the academic setting and not valued in academia.

After examining my two majors, I could not help but wonder about other fields.  According to Nesley, in social work, fieldwork is done as part of undergraduate or graduate school, and is, like anthropology, done through working with individuals and observing them. In economics, I would guess from class discussions that fieldwork is, like in computer science, gained through individual side projects, research, internships, or on the job training.  In the arts, I imagine fieldwork is done both before and during college, by practicing lots and experiencing other people's work, which matches the pattern for mathematics.  In geology or other earth sciences, I suppose fieldwork is going out into the world as an undergraduate or graduate student, as is done in anthropology.  I wonder if, in philosophy, fieldwork is reading lots of different philosophers' works or going out into the populous and thinking about the philosophy there.  I imagine that the understanding of philosophy gained would be different depending on which type of fieldwork was done.  Overall, what I notice is that neither the timeframe for doing "fieldwork" relative to the rest of the academic training nor whether the "fieldwork" is part of the curriculum or left to the student appears to depend on the position of the given discipline in the humanities-sciences spectrum.   

What fits this definition of fieldwork in your discipline?  When do students in your discipline do fieldwork?