Programmatic

The University of Mary has been educating students for the whole of life since its founding in 1959. Because of their commitment to education in the Catholic Benedictine tradition, Mary graduates live fully, live well, and thrive — as professional leaders in their fields and as servant leaders in their communities. Mary offers nearly 60 undergraduate majors and a range of master's and doctoral degrees, including online offerings, at a lower cost than many of the nation’s most notable universities.

Anticipated Degree & Program Major

BSN to Doctor of Nursing Practice (DNP): Family Nurse Practitioner

Program Information

List of Required Courses & Descriptions

Program Credit Hours: 86
Program Total Clinical Hours: 1280

Program Requirements

Unofficial Transcript

Program Outcomes

1. Demonstrates competence in health promotion, disease prevention and illness management of individuals, families and communities.

2. Utilizes servant leadership principles and expanded knowledge in health policy, advocacy, and healthcare quality to promote change in the delivery of care along the healthcare continuum.

3. Applies Benedictine values to foster a collaborative nurse practitioner-patient relationship that fosters respect, protection, and enhancement of spiritual integrity, human dignity, as well as cultural diversity to improve patient and population health outcomes.

4. Acts as a leader in knowledge translation and application of evidence based practice from nursing and related fields through critical evaluation, synthesis, and integration of health information data and research findings.

5. Influences, negotiates, and manages change among an inter-professional team for purposes of advancing healthcare quality among patients, populations, and systems.

6. Practices reflectivity as an advanced practice nurse who is aware of and responsive to environmental contexts that shape healthcare decision making.

Program Connection

The graduate outcomes of my DNP-FNP program have become the foundation for my emerging identity as an advanced practice nurse, and I can now see how each has been lived out in my clinical experiences. Through 1,000 hours of primary care and specialty rotations, I have strengthened my knowledge for nursing practice by learning to synthesize assessments, histories, diagnostics, and evidence into coherent plans for health promotion, disease prevention, and illness management for individuals and families. Each patient encounter helped “the pieces come together,” and specialty experience has deepened my clinical reasoning and physical assessment skills.

Person-centered care has been cultivated as I learned to recognize that a patient’s story, culture, beliefs, and social context are central to any safe and effective plan. I have practiced shared decision-making, particularly in challenging encounters, such as declining to prescribe weight loss medication when uncontrolled diabetes, thyroid dysfunction, and possible cardiac symptoms made that request unsafe. These moments required me to communicate clearly, listen more deeply, and acknowledge social determinants like finances and transportation while still upholding evidence-based, ethical care.

Working within inter- and intraprofessional teams while under the mentorship of engaged preceptors has advanced my competency in teamwork, collaboration, and systems thinking. Observing how seasoned clinicians pause to teach, explain their reasoning, and model integrative, collaborative care has shaped how I hope to practice with future colleagues and learners. Finally, repeated encounters with moral tension and imposter syndrome have strengthened my resilience and moral courage, aligning with the University of Mary graduate competencies around human dignity, justice, and servant leadership.

Together, these outcomes have prepared me to enter professional practice with a grounded clinical skillset, a reflective and emotionally intelligent stance, and a commitment to safe, high-quality, culturally sensitive, patient-centered care across the lifespan.