Do Nurses Need to Do an Internship?

No. The answer right at the start is no, nurses don’t ever have to do an internship. In fact, most nurses would be hard pressed to find a company that would offer them an internship. The skill set for medical professionals such as nurses is so drastically different that the corporate world would rarely ever consider a nurse for a role.

So, does that mean a nurse just goes to school and graduates and starts working? Well, there’s a little thing called clinicals, which we’ll get to in a bit. But first, let’s look at what an internship is and why nurses don’t need them or do them.

What is an Internship?

An internship, in the classic sense, is a role in a corporate company for college students to learn about their field. The roles were often unpaid, especially in competitive markets.

An example of an internship might be:

Marketing Intern: someone who helps with the marketing materials for a major company. This would be a low level role where the college student (who would have to be a Marketing major with a good resume) would learn about the marketing efforts of the company. They might be in the entertainment field, or the financial field. The pertinent factor was that the student knows and has studied Marketing.

P.R. Intern: this sort of internship would be for college students or recent graduates who majored in Public Relations. Their internship could involve anything from doing spreadsheets and researching current influencers to doing Press Release drafts.

Of course, you have the famous hedges and investment banks that have their super competitive internships. There are even websites dedicated just to discussing wall street and high stress internships.

The internship was designed to give college and university students a taste of the real world job market and let them hone their skills working for a company. Most colleges would arrange for the students to receive credit for these roles, while others sometimes were compensated.

However, the majority of the internships were for credit only. The fields are hyper competitive, so many college students understood the need to do internships to boost their resume.

Fields like Accounting or non-profit or government t related work , where there is less competition, often do compensate a small amount.  But we’re jumping a bit ahead of ourselves here.

Professional Internships vs Government and Non-Profit Internships

It’s important to step back and look at how the term internship has been redefined. Internships used to be used to describe professional roles in companies that students in colleges and universities were taking.

Now, however, you will see the phrase intern and internship sued to describe non-profit or government roles. This includes internships in hospitals for basic administrative roles.

The field has expanded to include lower level jobs. While originally internships were only used for people heading into corporate work, now people who are working in hospitals, government bureaucracies, and even non-profits do internships while at community colleges and other schools which are not at the same academic level as colleges and universities.

For instance, it’s not uncommon to see an internship listed for a Homeless Shelter worker in a major city. Often the individuals taking these roles are adults returning to work after years in prison or after having recovered from extended decades of drug abuse. The “internship” in this case is to establish a work history for the individual.

Sometimes you might have a student who did not have the grades or academic rigor to attend a good college or university and they are looking to work in the non-profit social service sector. They might take an internship at a non-profit or hospital where they assist with entering names and filling ouot forms to help indigent people receive benefits and social welfare such as EBT and rent vouchers.

This wasn’t traditionally what an internship was thought of, but as the workplace grew and the non-profit system grew, there was a need to train people for those roles.

The training is different than what you would find in a corporate environment, but nevertheless it was important to instruct individuals in how the systems ran.

The Difference Between Nursing School and College or University

One important thing to understand is that nurses do not attend the same sort of schools as other people. While there are some colleges of distinction that have nursing schools (think of places like Columbia in NYC) these are separate from their regular colleges.

Nursing schools are designed to train people in a trade. The focus is not on a classical liberal arts education. There will be no focus on things one finds in classical colleges or universities: philosophy, art, history, economics, communications. Even subjects that you might think would be studied such as biology and chemistry are only briefly discussed.

Nurses are not schooling to be doctors. Their trade is much different and therefore the subject matter is not what a pre-med student would learn in a regular college.

Because of this, nurses do not have to do internships. There is no place for a nurse in a corporate setting.

A nurse would learn northing of use in an internship in a corporate environment, and the company would have no use for a nursing student. It’s similar to a tradesman. Welders and Electricians do not do internships, they apprentice.

Much like other trades, nurses do something similar. They call it clinicals. Let’s see what that is.

What Do Nurses Have Instead of Internships

A clinical is the component of a nurses education that places them in a hospital environment. Sometimes a nurse might end up doing “clinical rotations” in a non-hospital environment, but it’s much preferred to work in a hospital.

The nurse will shadow other nurses and assist with nurse work. This might include:

• Cleaning bedpans
• Changing bandages
• Taking temperatures
• Retrieving Medications
• Transporting Patients
• Observing Procedures

Clinicals are not paid, which most nurses balk at. But it is the price to pay for a job that guarantees you work without the difficult job search that exists in other fields. Remember, nurses don’t need cover letters, but you do need a clinical.

All nurses should have an internship on their resume. If a nurse somehow graduates from nursing school and doesn’t have a clinical listed on their resume, then their changes of being hired on at a hospital or other high paying role dramatically decreases. Nurses who sneak by without clinicals end up working at re-hab facilities or retirement homes.

These places are all for-profit and pay nurses the least amount of money. Just to put an example out there: in Las Angeles  a retirement home nurse might make $40 dollars and hour. A Nurse who works in a hospital will make $70-80. If that nurse becomes a travel nurse, that salary bumps up to $130-$150 an hour to work in hospitals.

So, you can see the important of having your clinicals on your resume when you are ready to find a job.