How to Find a Preceptor (and Not Waste Your Clinical Hours)

Andrea Kemp is back for Part 2, and this one is for the students. If Part 1 took you inside the inpatient unit, this is the practical playbook: how to find a preceptor when your program won't, how to walk into day one of clinical ready, and how to actually learn once you're there instead of watching someone else work.

Andrea has precepted students for years and now teaches in a PMHNP program, so she sees both sides. She's blunt about what separates the students who get hired from the ones who get forgotten, and almost none of it is knowing every diagnosis. Show up with a notebook, not an iPad. Make yourself an asset, not a liability. Ask three good questions at the end of the day and look up the rest yourself. Curiosity over confidence, every single time.

The part that stuck with me: your didactic classes teach you how to be a provider, but your clinicals teach you how to be in a room with a human, and those are two different skills. Andrea walks through how she actually talks to patients — the five questions she never skips, why silence is a tool, why she'd rather ask a hard question than let someone off the hook, and how she narrows two hundred medications down to five without ever tricking anyone into a prescription.

We also get into the stuff nobody warns you about. Paying for clinicals. Preceptors who don't know how to use you. What to do when a patient doesn't want to be there. And how to protect your license when the board holds NPs to a harder line than physicians, including the state-board resource most students don't know exists.

If you're in a program right now, or about to start clinicals, take notes on this one.

Go listen. Then tell me what you wish you'd known sooner. — Lindsay

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