How Can a Master's in Global Conflict & Human Security Shape Your Career?

What is global conflict and human security (GCHS)? What can you do with a master's degree in the global affairs field? Is the degree worth it? For GCHS alum Kristy Miyashita, it led to the career she's always wanted. "Everything fed into each other really, really well...This [GCHS] was the only degree that actually allowed me to have the health care lens, but then focus on every other issue that I actually wanted to learn about," Kristy explained.

A registered nurse with a bachelor's degree from the University of Rhode Island, Kristy's journey in the health care field started more than a decade ago. But unlike most of her peers in the field, Kristy's ambitions lay outside the walls of a hospital.

Finding the Right Graduate Program

After finishing up her work in Paraguay, she moved back to the States, where she worked in a hospital for a few years, gaining the hard nursing skills she'd need to succeed in her career. During that time, she got the itch to go back to school and knew exactly what she wanted to do, thanks to her experience with the Peace Corps.

As soon as she found the GCHS program, she knew that it was the path for her. "Once I found it, I felt like it was just so niche and something I had never seen before in other degrees," Kristy explained. The GCHS program gave her the structure and freedom to use her health care expertise through a global security lens.

The Career Impact of the Capstone Project

Though many of her colleagues had a hard time seeing the connection between nursing and global conflict and human security, her work in the master's program proved the direct correlation.

Her capstone project, Redefining Health Care for Latino Asylum Seekers, was an experience that foreshadowed where her career was headed. Focused on the area she grew up in, in New York, Kristy canvased immigrant neighborhoods, interviewing Latino asylum seekers and helping them find and access health care. Little did she know how applicable that work would prove to be.

"It's just funny how each thing has exactly fit into my next steps, because this project, the capstone, is basically a mirror of my job now at Sloan Kettering, where my department is called Immigrant Health and Cancer Disparities, and I'm working primarily with Latino asylum seekers and immigrants...I'm going to some of the same places that I went to by myself," Kristy reflects. 

"It became a full circle moment. And when I was interviewing for the job, and I was telling the leadership of the department about how I feel like I was doing the job already, they were so impressed by it. So, I feel like I was reaping the benefits really quickly because it happened as soon as I finished the degree."

Putting a Human Security Degree into Action

Applying to the GCHS program was the first step in bridging Kristy’s nursing background with her drive to help people. Today, as one of just two Clinical Trials Nurses in her department, she combines her passions for nursing and humanitarian relief, working in a mobile health unit to bring care to underserved communities across New York’s five boroughs.

"When I saw the job listing, I had a visceral reaction to it because I was like, no way is this literally describing exactly what I want to do verbatim. Right now, I just can't think of something else I would want to do more than I'm doing right now."