MDP student Alyssa Ylinen: Exploring new avenues for improving public health
Even as an undergraduate nursing student, Alyssa Ylinen ’26 suspected that attending graduate school and a career related to public health were likely in her future. About 15 years and a few interesting career stops later, Ylinen is much further along that path.
She’s in her final semester of the Master of Development Practice (MDP) program at the Humphrey School of Public Affairs and pondering a host of new career options — even as her one complaint about the School says more about its strengths than its weaknesses.
“I would say the worst thing about the Humphrey School is that there are too many awesome classes to take and not enough time to take them,” she says.
Ylinen grew up in Mendota Heights, Minnesota, the daughter of parents who met while both played basketball at the University of St. Thomas. She was recruited to play basketball at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she was able to study nursing thanks to an exemption from the nursing dean who determined that Ylinen would be able to handle the schedule strain.
After completing her degree at UW-Madison, she took advantage of “an incredible opportunity” to play basketball professionally for two years in Germany. It wasn’t exactly a luxury experience — her team traveled by van, stopped to eat at McDonald’s, and sometimes shared a locker room with the opposing team — but, “looking back, I wish I had done it longer,” Ylinen says.
Her first of three nursing jobs was at the neonatal intensive care unit at St. Cloud Hospital. Being in an ICU with neonates was an intense experience, and it also exposed her to some of the upstream issues affecting health.
“There was a lot of drug use and a lot of really sad stories in terms of family dynamics,” Ylinen says. “It was a lot of case management too. You’re taking care of your patient but you’re kind of managing all the other things going on.”
Alyssa Ylinen poses with healthcare colleagues during her time as an operating room nurse.
She then worked for several years in the operating room at United Hospital — mainly with the orthopedics team — and also for Summit Orthopedics. Her humble brag that she shared with her Humphrey School cohort: “I’ve either touched or seen every single organ in the human body.”
Ylinen has enjoyed all of her nursing stops, but there was something missing. “When I was in the operating room I felt like I was almost just a cog. Surgery is a moneymaker in a hospital, and we don’t get paid unless we do the surgery," she says.
"So I wanted to be more on the other end of that. … I just wanted to be part of something that was more upstream and prevent people from getting to this point.”
One thing that really drew me to the Humphrey School, and the MDP specifically, was that so many things touch health. Health is not in a silo; education, economics — so many things influence it. I really liked the Humphrey School MDP because it gets to that systems thinking.
A program rich in systems thinking
Ylinen has long had a desire to work in public health and explore international development, and those two interests funneled her toward the MDP program, which prepares students for careers in international development, equipping them with the skills needed to address the problems of poverty, social justice, and sustainable development.
“One thing that really drew me to the Humphrey School, and the MDP specifically, was that so many things touch health,” Ylinen says. “Health is not in a silo; education, economics — so many things influence it. I really liked the Humphrey School MDP because it gets to that systems thinking.”
She’s thrilled that her courses have spanned economics, agricultural systems, education systems, gender studies, and more. Now, as she is close to completing her degree, she’s actually longing for more. “I could go to school for years and not get sick of the class offerings,” she says.
Ylinen is amazed at the quality of her instructors. “The people teaching are really the people who are at the highest level of their craft,” she says. “Having those connections and learning from them has been something I just didn’t expect.”
One of her favorite courses has been a program development course taught by David Wilsey, the MDP director, which “helped us prepare really well for the [10-week] summer field experiences that we were going into,” she says.
Ylinen wound up working for PeacePlayers — an international organization that uses basketball to help bridge divides for youth — evaluating a leadership development program for high school–aged participants in Detroit and New York.
Her dilemma now is trying to nail down the next stop in her career path. “I thought I’d come out of this knowing exactly what I wanted to do, and it’s like the opposite, because I’ve been opened up to so many different things,” Ylinen says. She can picture herself in a sport-for-development organization like PeacePlayers, or something else within the health realm — perhaps a public health department or a health-related NGO.
“The Humphrey School has opened my eyes to so many different cool things that I could see myself doing,” she says. “I feel like I should get my PhD; there’s so much more I want to explore! So, they keep you coming back for more, that’s for sure.”