Priya Patel, RN, MSN

Priya did her ADN at a community college in central New Jersey, worked nights on a med-surg floor for four years to fund her BSN, and finally finished an MSN in Nursing Education part-time in 2019. She tells nursing students this on purpose: the unglamorous, non-linear route is more common than the brochures suggest, and the candidates who finish are not the ones who started with the cleanest plan.

Her last bedside post was two years in an MICU at a Newark teaching hospital. Since 2020 she has worked full-time as a clinical educator and NCLEX coach — first at her former employer's pre-licensure programme, and then independently. She has guided more than four hundred candidates through the Next Generation NCLEX (NGN) since the format rolled out in April 2023, and helped redesign her prior employer's NCLEX bootcamp around the new clinical-judgment item types.

Her credentials include the NCLEX-RN, Certified Nurse Educator (CNE), ACLS, and PALS. She retested her NCLEX-RN under the current 2023–2026 test plan because she believes coaches who haven't sat the current format lose touch with the item-style intuition that matters most in the booth.

On Cert Climb she covers the nursing-school admissions tracks (TEAS, HESI A2, PAX) and the licensure exams (NCLEX-RN, NCLEX-PN). She is unromantic about it: the NCLEX is a competency floor, not a measure of nursing excellence. The goal is to clear that floor on the first attempt so you can spend your residency learning what the test couldn't measure.