Minjaal Raval

Minjaal Raval, MSW is a fourth- year doctoral student University of Texas School at Arlington Social Work of Social Work’s (UTA SSW) Ph.D. program. She is an international student hailing from Gujarat, India. She received Bachelor of Science in Zoology with a minor in Botany. She then completed her Master of Social Work from the Maharaja Sayajirao University, in Gujarat, India. and a Post Graduate Diploma in Guidance and Counselling from the same university.

Her practice experience spans four field settings during her MSW, providing diverse perspectives and skills spanning over four semesters. At Maretha Village, she organized community drives and awareness programs to discuss sensitive topics such as menstruation and gender norms with children. During her internship in an assisted living facility for young male children without parents, she worked in addressing perceptions of the opposite sex and relationships among young and adolescent males within them as well as with others at the facility by organizing focus groups and individual casework. In CSR and human resources at Aditya Birla Insulators, her focus was on working on industry understanding, team leadership, policymaking, and the implementation of the PoSh Act which is India’s law against workplace sexual harassment of women. She also briefly worked as a counselor at Sir Sayajirao Blood Bank where she organized blood donation camps across cities.

As a doctoral student, she contributed to organizing virtual town hall meetings for a Texas-based project on intellectual and developmental disorders. She also participated in reminiscence projects, telephone-based interventions, and a study on VET-SAVR-R, gaining insights into VR applications and exploring their potential in designing preventive interventions for intimate partner violence. She then served as a project manager on an interdisciplinary team leading a nationwide initiative to promote sleep health among U.S. social workers, overseeing project coordination and data collection. She also worked on policy project where her main responsibilities were policy scoring and transcription. She currently works as a clinic coordinator at UTA’s MAVS Ending Tech Facilitated Clinic (MAVS ETA).