Vojtech Horna has yet to receive his college degree, but he already knows what it is like to design a national marketing campaign for a Fortune 500 company. That’s because Horna, a USC senior majoring in public relations, is part of the media-savvy student group that conceived the Chevrolet Aveo Livin’ Large Campus Challenge.

The contest is being held this week. It will challenge two USC students to live for five days inside a Chevy Aveo parked in Herbert Plaza near the intersection of Hoover and Jefferson. Student teams also will be living inside Aveos at seven other schools, including Boston University, Michigan State and Florida State. The contestants will be shown on YouTube.com, the popular video-sharing Web site. Viewers will vote for the team they feel does the best job of “livin’ large.” The winners, as well as their university, will receive a new Aveo.

Horna is president of the USC chapter of the Public Relations Student Society of America (PRSSA). His involvement with the campaign began in April when he attended PRSSA’s annual national assembly. All attendees had the opportunity to participate in a competition organized by assembly sponsor General Motors, which told the students it was looking for ways to launch the Chevy Aveo for the college crowd. Students were divided into teams and told they had one hour to devise a complete public relations plan for the launch.

Horna’s team won the competition with its prototype for the Livin’ Large Challenge. “I thought that was it,” Horna said. But in mid-September, he received a call from GM, which decided to put the plan into action and included USC as one of the participating schools.

Horna, who credited the success of his team’s idea to its focus on the type of media that really reaches college students, rattled off statistics on Web sites used in the campaign. “The average college user is on Facebook for 20 minutes every day,” he explained. “When we were planning, YouTube had 40 million downloads per day, and now it’s more like 100 million.” He noted that GM executives were blown away because they had no idea that such large audiences existed in online communities.

“In Annenberg, you’re always thinking of audiences, so that helped me,” he said. Still, what gave the team its competitive edge was a blend of public relations training and practical research. “It was smart for GM to ask college students,” Horna said. “Who else would know where college students go for information?”

Do you know of someone who takes learning, especially undergraduate research, beyond classroom walls? If so, please e-mail Professor Mark Kann at mkann@usc.edu to suggest a feature for this column.