Clinical Education Component  At Puget Sound, your clinical education experiences are designed in a developmental sequence to help you first establish a firm foundation in clinical skills and behaviors, and build from that foundation to help you develop confidence in your professional ability while gaining a rich variety of experiences. Over the length of the program you will spend 30 weeks in off-site internships, and you will have the equivalent of about 8 additional weeks of clinical experience in our on-site clinic.
Your earliest clinical experiences are short events that take place as classroom assignments in the first year. For example, in the first semester of the program, you will participate in designing and presenting injury prevention services for nursing students at a neighboring university, and you will have experiences taking histories from clients who are being seen in our on-site clinic.
In the second year you will begin to work in the student-run on-site clinic one full day per week throughout the academic year. In the summer, you will spend nine weeks in a full-time clinic off campus. Clinics available for those internships are located throughout the western United States, including Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Colorado, Utah, and Minnesota.
In the third year of the program, you will spend two full days per week working in the student-run on-site clinic during fall semester. You will simultaneously be enrolled in courses that will give you an opportunity to develop advanced clinical skills in a chosen area and emphasize analysis and critical thinking. Your clinical experiences will be integrated with classroom work. In the spring semester, you will leave campus and spend a total of 21 weeks in full-time internship practice, typically at two different internship sites. If you are interested in experimenting with niche practice areas, such as women's health, hippotherapy, sports physical therapy, or oncology physical therapy, you will have an opportunity to arrange to do one of your final internships in a clinic that includes such practice. Clinics available for those internships are located throughout the western United States, including Washington, Oregon, California, Alaska, Hawaii, Montana, Colorado, Utah, and Minnesota. An optional fourth internship can add four-to-eight more weeks of clinical experience for interested students. | 
