Post University's MSN PMHNP: credits, clinical hours and preceptors

The PMHNP in numbers

The PMHNP is the longest of Post's three nurse practitioner tracks and the only one with five preceptorships rather than four. Post University's American Sentinel College of Nursing & Health Sciences runs it entirely online.

Those credits come straight from the course list: six core and 3P courses and eleven specialty courses at three credits each make 51, and a student who needs N 523 Diagnostic Reasoning after a first 3P exam failure picks up three more. Post publishes only the range; the breakdown is our arithmetic.

Every catalog from 2021-22 through 2025-26 keeps the precepted requirement at 630. The 2025-26 table also puts the NP tracks' total practice hours at 585-675, while its footnote says 630-720; both ranges fold in practice-experience hours from core courses, and they differ because the practice-experience hours once attached to N 522PE ended in August 2024. For preceptor planning, 630 is the figure that matters.

The PMHNP courses and their preceptorships

Past the core, the specialization has eleven courses, N 559 through N 569. N 559 Psychotropic Pharmacology stands on its own, and its 2021-22 description puts it after N 560. The remaining ten work as five pairs, each a didactic course followed a term later by its preceptorship.

"Implied" here means the 630 total less the 90 printed for N 567, divided evenly among the other four; Post has printed no course-level figure for N 561, N 563 or N 569. Every preceptorship has a guide of its own: N 561 for the first term, N 563 for young patients, N 565 for adults and older adults, N 567 for adolescent substance misuse and N 569 for the finish.

Who finds the preceptor

Post's 2025-26 catalog is direct about it: "Each Master of Science in Nursing student in a nurse practitioner specialization is responsible for selecting an appropriate clinical site and preceptor for each clinical experience." For a PMHNP student that adds up to five separate searches, one per preceptorship.

Post's online tuition page says the same for NP students and adds that they may contract with an outside company whose business is locating nearby clinical preceptors. That describes what we do for Post PMHNP students.

All five searches end at one checkpoint. When Week 1 of a preceptorship closes, Post expects a signed preceptor agreement letter, an executed affiliation agreement, current CastleBranch compliance, the NP Clinical Schedule, your RN license report, the preceptor's license report, certification and CV, and the student contact form; a missing piece means removal from that course term. Some state boards add a request for your clinical plan as much as 60 days before it begins.

Pace, starts and staying on track

NP students move through one course at a time, each lasting eight weeks, and the competency-based SIMPath format is closed to them. Post's NP pages promise monthly starts, yet the 2024 ASC schedule offered NP specialty and clinical courses in six terms a year, those beginning in odd-numbered months. Your Student Success Advisor can tell you which pattern your plan follows, and that decides when each preceptorship begins.

Anything under a B (83%) in a nursing course, B- included, is a failing grade. Any one NP course may be retaken a single time; once the 3P exam is behind you, the retake allowance shrinks to one NP-specific course for the rest of the program, and N 523 has none. Retaking a preceptorship means logging its clinical hours again.

No campus visit is part of the program. What NP courses do require is attendance at scheduled live online sessions, from exams and presentations to the final graduation meeting, and Post warns that skipping them may cost you the course or your place in the program. The 34 advertised months assume steady progress; 42 months is the ceiling.