From your own search to cleared to start

Outside Maricopa County, ASU expects you to find your own preceptor and sites. In ASU's words, "students residing outside of Maricopa County, Arizona, are responsible for identifying the required number of clinical sites in their area of residence and for identifying preceptors and sites willing to accommodate clinical rotations." The DNP program office does not guarantee a placement, and Edson approves what you bring. That means the search, the outreach, and the approval paperwork all land on you unless someone runs them for you, which is the job this service exists to do.

That split is the whole reason this page exists. In-county students can lean on ASU to arrange focused clinical experiences, but the online and out-of-state students who make up most of the cohort inherit the search, the outreach, and the approval paperwork as a second job stacked on top of a doctoral course load. Our process is built to lift that second job off you without pretending we are the university.

We break the placement into four stages so nothing falls through: identify, verify, Edson approval, and cleared to start. You give us your concentration, city, and start term; we run the search you would otherwise run alone, confirm the match against ASU's rules, carry the sites through approval, and hand you a cleared placement. The table shows what happens at each stage and what you end up with.

The order matters as much as the steps. Verifying a match before you commit means you do not sink weeks into a preceptor Edson will not approve; carrying the approval before you count on a start date means you are not surprised by an affiliation agreement that never got signed. Each stage exists to catch a failure that would otherwise surface too late to fix without losing a term.

As early as you can. A doctoral practicum of more than 1,000 hours plus Edson approval takes real lead time, and the scarcest placements, psychiatric and specialty rotations, fill earliest. The further ahead of your start term you begin, the more approvable options we can reach and the more runway there is for approval, which is the difference between starting on schedule and losing a term.

There is also a compounding effect to starting early: the earlier you reach a provider, the more likely their calendar is still open, and the more time there is to try a second option if the first falls through. Students who begin a term ahead almost always have more approvable choices than students who begin the semester before, which is the difference between placing well and taking whatever is left.

Only once your preceptor and site are confirmed. There is no charge for a placement that is not secured, so you are never paying for a promise. The fee covers our sourcing, verification, and approval work, and it is never a payment to the preceptor, who is not compensated by you for supervising your hours.

This is deliberate, and it is how you can tell a placement service is aligned with you. If a service asks for money before it has secured anything, its incentive is signing you up, not placing you. Paying only on a confirmed preceptor and site keeps the risk of a search that does not pan out with us, where it belongs, rather than on your card.

Very little to begin: your ASU concentration, the city or region where you will complete clinicals, and your intended start term. From there we can tell you what your search realistically looks like, which settings and preceptor types will match your concentration, and how much runway you have before Edson approval needs to be underway. The more lead time you give us, the more approvable options we can put in front of you, but an early conversation costs you nothing and is not a commitment, and we come back with a placement plan and a realistic path to your first clinical hour.

We are not ASU, and we do not decide what Edson approves. We source and vet approvable preceptors and shepherd the paperwork, but the final site-approval decision belongs to the university, and we never promise an outcome it controls. What we stand behind is the work: a real search, an honest read on whether a match will clear, and a complete submission, so your effort goes into your program instead of cold-calling clinics between classes.

That honesty is not a limitation, it is the point. A service that promises what only the university can deliver is setting you up to be surprised at approval; a service that is clear about the boundary lets you plan against reality. We would rather tell you early that a match is unlikely to clear than let you count on it and lose the term, which is the whole reason our fee is tied to a confirmed, approved placement.

Sources: ASU Edson College clinical placements, ASU MS and DNP FAQ, and NONPF.