Clarkson College and Nebraska Medicine: the partnership and your placement

How Clarkson describes the relationship

Clarkson's About page says the college "maintains an educational partnership with Nebraska Medicine, one of the largest and most respected medical campuses in the region." Its partnership page goes further, calling the tie long-standing and proud, tracing it back more than a century, and listing benefits for Nebraska Medicine employees that include "preceptorship and clinical opportunities."

The relationship shows up in Clarkson's formal documents too. Nebraska Medicine heads Clarkson's list of Founding Partners, ahead of OrthoNebraska, Community Hospital at Fairfax, Clarkson Regional Health Services and others. Clarkson's liability insurance policy (SW-12) names Nebraska Medicine as the certificate holder.

Those are Clarkson's own words, and they are the only relationship this site describes. They establish a close educational bond; they say nothing about reserving preceptors for Clarkson graduate students, and the rest of this page explains why that distinction matters for your planning.

The 2018 memo: priority, in Nebraska Medicine's words

The clearest statement about placement comes from a Nebraska Medicine memo that Clarkson hosted on its own site for Summer and Fall 2018 placements. It said an Academic Affiliation Agreement among UNMC, Clarkson and Nebraska Medicine gave students from those two programs priority placement.

Priority is a place in line, not a seat. The request form Clarkson posted beside the memo, a spreadsheet dated 2016 to 2017, treated any named preceptor as a request only and stated that completing the form was no promise of a placement. UNMC students held the same priority, so Clarkson students were never the only ones at the front of the queue.

The memo was written for 2018 terms, and Nebraska Medicine's current student placement page does not restate it. Ask your Graduate Nursing advisor whether any priority still applies before you count on it, and read the affiliation agreements guide for how an existing agreement shortens Clarkson's paperwork.

If you work at Nebraska Medicine

Employees are the group Clarkson's partnership page speaks to most directly, with benefits that include preceptorship and clinical opportunities. The clinical rules still apply in full. Clarkson's November 2023 sheets required employed students to train in a department other than their own, and the 2021-22 handbook asked for work hours and clinical hours to be documented separately.

The same sheets told Nebraska Medicine employees to contact the Director before any preceptor hours to get a separate Epic user ID for student work, and Clarkson's 2025 resources page routed Epic training questions to the Director of Graduate Nursing's office. A new agreement form is still needed for every preceptor, every course and every semester, even inside your own employer.

The workplace clinicals guide covers the department rule and the record-keeping in detail.

Planning around a Nebraska Medicine application

Clarkson students choose us because an application to a large system works best with a second lane beside it. We help you apply early in the right window, and in parallel your placement advisor lines up a qualified preceptor at an independent practice near you, screened against Clarkson's rules for your course. If Nebraska Medicine says yes, you take it and we release the backup courteously; if it says no or answers late, your agreement is already moving.

Because Clarkson's NP tracks allow only one clinical course at a time, we plan every remaining course together, so a Nebraska Medicine rotation in one term fits a sequence that already has preceptors penciled in for the next. When the window for your next course opens, your placement advisor reminds you in its first days. The form below starts that plan: name your NP track, the clinical course ahead of you and where you live.