Although most students have learned to succeed academically, by the time they enter our business communication courses, their time as students is almost over. This article describes the challenges facing “students who will soon stop being students” and introduces the professional online portfolio as a project which enables them to develop the confidence, the capacity, and a concrete platform with which to communicate with the world outside the black box of school.

Dozens of forms of communication across thousands of firms are being used both to achieve a measure of operational sustainability and to publicize those efforts externally to the many external constituencies on whose attitudes and beliefs the success of those firms depend. The history of how this has come to be is interesting and important, but what I am interested in here is the fundamentally narrative nature of sustainability as a rhetorical topic and the degree to which telling stories about sustainability is becoming a critical business practice for companies of all kinds.While most forms of external business written communication tend to be discrete, atomized, and dispatch-style (e.g., quarterly financial reports, press releases, Twitter posts), when businesses write about sustainability they typically take a longer view and use story-like narrative conventions to make an impact on readers. This makes sense given that any discussion of sustainability requires one to make a connection between what one is doing now and how that will impact the future. Think, for example, of an advertisement or press release touting investments an energy company is making in sustainable wind technology. The story typically goes, "We are making this investment today because it will pay off in the future and help ensure a cleaner environment for our kids." The temporal projection is purely outward from the present into the future. Such statements about sustainability might be impressive and impactful, but they are typically not dramatic in a rhetorical sense because they do not contain the three temporal markers of traditional narrative (beginning, middle, end).

What is Business Communication?Is it *any* communication by *anyone*, "about", "business"? Is it only communication that is created by a business or takes place "inside" a business? What people can speak as a business? Can those people ever *not* speak as a business? Who decides whether a particular communication is "business communication" or whether it is, simply, "communication"? Can any communication become or be transformed into "business communication"? If it can, who has ability to do that?These questions are perhaps tedious but the consequences of how business communication scholars and educators answereither explicitly or implicitly-are significant. And yet, while there have been many articles over the years seeking to answer the question "What is the field of business communication?", the question "What is business communication?" has been very rarely asked much less answered (Daniel, 1983;Keyser, 1972). In his 1993 article "The Shape of Our Field: Business Communication as a Hybrid Discipline, " Shaw wrote "The difficulty we've had defining the discipline has, more than any other problem in the field, compromised our full acceptance into the broader academic community" (Shaw, 1993, p. 298). For Shaw, defining the field is

The articles published by Chang, Park, and Cho (2018) and Jung (2018) in the inaugural issue of Business Communication Research and Practice (BCRP) perform an incredibly valuable service to all those who are currently or will in the future be interested in understanding the state of business communication teaching and research in Korea. Both articles provide well-researched, comprehensive, and -perhaps most importantlyuseful information that will enable the next generation of leaders in the field to expand and enhance the impact of Korean business communication from a position of strength and optimism.In this brief Communication, which I hope will extend the conversation, I identify the most significant shared conclusion of these two articles. I then describe how this shared conclusion -and the scholarly, field-building opportunity it highlightsaligns perfectly with a significant national need and with the discourse and resources that have recently been devoted to addressing that need. My goal is to draw attention to the synergies between 'What business communication can do' and 'What Korean leaders say needs to be done' and to sketch a potential opening for Korean business communication researchers and teachers to achieve both the student-level and national impact that all agree can and should be achieved.