School of Nursing

Practicum Experiences

The Graduate Capstone Practicum is a culminating experience designed to provide students with an opportunity to apply nursing leadership knowledge and skills acquired throughout the program of study focusing on the competencies of the graduate level nurse leader. The experience will involve a project related to a professional nursing phenomenon of interest such as, but not limited to: direct patient care issue, quality/process improvement, healthcare policy, or nursing administration.

In the Masters in Nursing: Health Systems & Organizational Leadership (HSOL) program, you will earn 320 hours of practicum experience. These hours are eligible to be counted as supervised practice hours towards the Doctor of Nursing Practice Practicum requirements of 1000 practice hours. For every 1 credit hour of practicum, you will be completing 40 hours of practice. These credits are taken in the second year. 

In the event of using your place of work for your practicum activity, you may not conduct “work as usual” when you are logging in these practice hours. Rather, your practice hours are in addition to your hours of work that you are doing for your job. We have you track your activities in our Analytic Log that is associated with the NURS 509MC Practicum/Capstone: Transition to Leading and Managing Change (8 credits) and as outlined by your supervising faculty. This practicum experience allows you to practice, synthesize, apply, analyze and evaluate new knowledge gained from your academic study into your practice.