Hitting the same notes: Kozhevnikova talks similarities in public health, music after receiving PPS honors


First-year MHA/MBA student Uliana Kozhevnikova joined HPM with an impressive resume, including multiple graduate degrees in music and experience teaching piano at Pittsburgh Creative and Performing Arts 6–12 (CAPA), Pittsburgh Public Schools’ (PPS) magnet school for creative and performing arts.

Recently, the district recognized her work by naming her a Distinguished Educator, something she said validates all the effort.

“Teaching within PPS carries a few extra layers compared to a private setting — being part of an established system with fairly rigid guardrails makes the work noticeably harder than it would be otherwise,” she said, adding that she worked to incorporate new system-design elements into her work. “Even though there were a few bumps along the way, having that effort recognized like this is deeply fulfilling.”

To Kozhevnikova, the connections between music and public health are easy to see. “Both have made me very tuned in to people and their needs, and to adjusting in real time when something isn't working,” she said.

She attributes her strong listening skills directly to music. “As performers, we're constantly evaluating in the moment what's actually coming out from under our fingers, how it compares with what we intended to produce, and, in the case of collaborating with other musicians, monitoring their response and reacting to that,” she said, adding that in health care, the same skill– real–time listening and adjusting and quickly noticing when something is off is just as valuable.

As she looks forward to the newest chapter in her career, Kozhevnikova says pursuing health care administration isn’t so much about pivoting away from teaching as it is about scaling up the same instinct that earned her honors from PPS.

“Teachers carry a version of burnout every day too — it just doesn't get named as often as it does in health care,” she said. “What's kept me going through that is the same thing I want to bring into health systems design: a constant push to improve the fundamentals everything else stands on, rather than patching symptoms as they come up.”


-Mike Friend

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