Athletic trainers are sports medicine specialists who focus on the prevention, evaluation, management, treatment, and rehabilitation of athletic injuries. Athletic trainers care for physically active individuals in secondary schools, colleges and universities, professional athletic teams, hospitals, private clinics, and industrial settings under the direction of a physician. They are the ones who get the athletes back into the game.

In Northeastern’s athletic training program, you learn the background information in the classroom, practice the skills in the laboratory, and refine your technique during clinical affiliations and co-op work experiences. These techniques are integrated into upper-level classes where orthopedic evaluation, cadaver anatomy, and treatment and rehabilitation are synthesized into useful, real-life skills that you apply in clinical settings. The basic professional skills that you need to learn are incorporated into a series of three assessment classes that integrate emergency care, evaluation, treatment, and rehabilitation.

Northeastern’s athletic training program offers you three kinds of practical experiences. A co-op is a paid employment experience that allows you to practice your job search and interviewing skills, function as an employee in a health-care organization, and learn the business of health care while you gain clinical skills. A clinical affiliation is a for-credit class where you function as a full-fledged member of the medical team under the supervision of a certified/licensed athletic trainer. On your clinicals, you will master the specific clinical proficiencies that you learned in lab. During the senior field experience, you will function as a clinician while bolstering the professional areas that you think need improvement. You can do everything that certified athletic trainers do, and you still have the safety net of direct supervision and contact with the faculty.