How do I find a practicum placement?

Most placements come from a mix of your program's existing connections and your own outreach. Use both at once.

Start with your program

Your practicum coordinator is the best first stop. Many programs keep a list or database of approved sites and preceptors who have hosted students before. Those sites often already have an affiliation agreement with your university, which can save weeks of paperwork.

Then widen the net

• Alumni. Graduates of your program who work at organizations you're interested in can tell you whether they host students and who to contact.
• Job boards and agency websites. Check APHA's Public Health CareerMart, local and state health department websites, and nonprofit career pages.
• Professional events. Conferences and local public health meetings let you meet potential preceptors before you ever send an application.
• Direct outreach. If an organization has never hosted a student, you can still pitch a specific project that meets a real need of theirs.

Make outreach work

Cold outreach often gets silence, and that's normal. Plan to contact many organizations, since a low response rate is typical. Still, a few well-researched, personalized emails will do better than a large batch of generic ones. Follow up once after about a week to ten days, then move on. Surviving the cold outreach rejection spiral covers how to raise your response rate without losing confidence.

Stay flexible, not desperate

Being open to a different specialty, organization type, or even a remote site is smart. If options are scarce where you live, see rural placement gaps for other approaches. Accepting a site with no real work or no meaningful supervision is not smart, though. Before you say yes, make sure the preceptor meets your program's qualification requirements and the work can support the competencies you need to show.