The life of a graduate student and a musician do not often intersect. One requires hours holed up in the library, the other involves playing shows. One involves teaching classes, the other entertaining crowds.

However, for Eric Nelson — a third-year grad student in the UI School of Journalism and Mass Communication — the two seem to blend perfectly.

Nelson, in addition to being a journalism student, is the vocalist and guitarist for Des Moines-based pop-rock outfit Hold for Swank.

“It’s been tough, but it’s worth it,” Nelson said. “It’s fun. I wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t fun.”

The singer started the band with bassist Max Kenkel when the two attended Buena Vista University in Storm Lake, Iowa. Nelson and Kenkel met at a party when they began playing a game involving throwing beer cans at a moving ceiling fan.

“He’s one of my best friends and has been since pretty much the day we met,” Kenkel said. “He enjoyed the ‘fan can’ game as much as I did.”

They only played three shows while in college, Nelson said, but they kept at it after that. Now, Hold for Swank is beginning to gain national attention, with songs featured on shows such as Oxygen’s “The Bad Girls Club” and MTV’s “Real World/Road Rules Challenge.” Nelson said hearing his songs on television is like when the band in That Thing You Do first heard its song on the radio, only “even more surreal.”

“On TV, it’s like all these weird people doing this weird stuff, and your music is the soundtrack for that,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Oh my god, I have to call all my friends. These chicks are slipping and sliding to our song.’ ”

In addition to playing in Hold for Swank, Nelson is working on an entertainment webzine as a part of his studies. The lack of press coverage for bands in local papers is what gave him the idea, he said.

“It seems like if I try to get press releases for our band in smaller town newspapers, I always hear ‘we don’t have an entertainment section,’ ” he said. “It’s frustrating as a musician and as a journalist.”

He plans to continue working on the project after graduating.

“Ideally, I would get advertisers and turn it into a part-time job or at least a paying hobby for a while,” Nelson said.

Though journalism and music sound like professions that would not go well together, Nelson said studying journalism has helped his music career.

“There are a lot of aspects of journalism that I will put into play with the band,” he said. These include professional tasks such as drawing up press releases, but also things like choosing the best words for lyrics.

“They’re not totally hand-in-hand,” he said. “But they’re not completely separate.”

It can be hard to get together sometimes, but Nelson’s partners in Hold for Swank, Kenkel and drummer Nick Talley, said Nelson’s residing in Iowa City isn’t a problem for the Des Moines-based group.

“It works,” Talley said. “We’re constantly e-mailing each other back and forth just to make sure we’re on the same page.”

Ever since Nelson and Kenkel graduated from college, the band members have never lived in the same city at the same time.

“No matter what, we can’t all be in the same town,” Nelson joked. “It’s been easier doing it from here as a grad student than it was living in Waterloo and working a full-time job. It hasn’t been that bad, thankfully.”