For most NFL players, Tuesdays are sacred days during the football season. Each week, all 32 teams give their players Tuesday off to rest, recuperate, spend time with family and cram in a week's worth of personal business. Most players treasure their only free day of the week and wouldn't dream of spending it at work.

Not second-year Patriots defensive end Jarvis Green.

Green, who earned a degree in construction engineering at Louisiana State University, has taken a second job interning at a Rolls-Royce Naval Marine plant in Walpole, Massachusetts on Tuesdays.

A Patriots equipment manager, who had some ties to the Rolls Royce plant located about 10 miles from the team's stadium in Foxboro, informed Green of its existence and after some research, Green came to find that Rolls-Royce Naval Marine CFO Jorge Morales was also an LSU graduate.

After accepting an invitation to visit the plant and talking to Morales several times, Green was said an internship with the company that has him working Tuesday during the season and throughout the work week during the off-season. "With me being up here already in the area, and with my degree in engineering, I was very interested," Green said. "My degree is in construction management, which is more civil engineering, but I told him I would love to learn more about Rolls-Royce and asked him if I could come in and visit. He was happy to do it. I came at the right time because they were looking to diversify the company."

Green, who joined the Patriots as a fourth-round draft pick in 2002, has not been given token duties or treated with kid gloves because he happens to play for the local football club. "I am a project manager and I learn under the rest of the project managers," he explained. "It's more estimating and breaking down a job into exactly what is going to get done. We work a lot with the United States government doing jobs for the Navy. So I'll get a propeller job and I'll have to break down that job from day one until the day the job is finished. The average job takes about three years for a set of propellers. So you have to see where all the money is going with labor, overhead, the cost, the delivery and the time. So that's the part of the company I'll be learning about during the internship."

Despite likely watching him perform on the field on Sundays, Green isn't treated like a celebrity by his co-workers at Rolls-Royce. "They've been great and I think I surprised them when I got there because football players have a certain stereotype," he said. "I just went in there with the knowledge I gained in school and tried to show them that I wanted to learn more. I told them not to treat me like a football player."

Even the most studious NFL players do not use the knowledge they acquired in the college classroom on a day-to-day basis the way Green does and that's something the 24-year old is proud of. "I feel very good about using my degree and that it's not collecting dust on the shelf," he commented. "That's one of the main reasons why I went to college. Part of it was football but I also wanted to get a good education. Now I can really say that it was worth it because I'm out there in the real world and everyone knows football doesn't last forever."

Not only is Green putting his degree to good use but he also is preparing himself for a possible post-NFL career. "I've always wanted to own a construction company someday and this will help me as far as being a project manager and learning how to keep things in order," he said. "Also, I will learn to manage time and work within deadlines and budgets. Working with the propellers will be similar to construction in that you have to get things done on time and use the funds that are given to you. You have to keep things in order to be successful."

The internship is also a chance for Green to see how companies outside of the NFL operate. After all, most employees don't enjoy the same benefits and perks of professional athletics. "I wanted to work in a business setting outside the locker room so after football, the transition will not be as hard for me to go out and get a regular job," Green stated. "I wanted to have the foundation of working for a good company like Rolls-Royce."

So on Tuesdays, while some players are lounging by the pool, stretching out on the couch or running around with their families, Green will be hard at work with the rest of the crew down at the Walpole Rolls-Royce Naval Marine plant. "I am motivated to go to my job," he said. "I'm there from eight in the morning until about 1:30 or 2 p.m. The more and more I go, the more I'm starting to love it because I'm learning more about what is going on. I've always loved ships and in high school I worked on a ship over the Christmas holiday to make some extra money. I've been on a ship before but now I'm learning more about propellers and how they are built and used to move the ships. I'm really interested in learning more about it. Hopefully I can wind up doing something like this after football."