Student Spotlight: Ray Mathew-Santhosham

Ray Mathew-Santhosham, BSSW ’24, ASAP ’25

• Art-based intervention research, The Wexner Center for the Arts
• My favorite course thus far was general practice with groups because our community lecturer created a fun learning environment while helping me refine group facilitation skills that are very relevant to my fieldwork.
• I’ve known I wanted to be a heroic social worker for quite some time but if I had to pick a moment it would be when I was a patient in a pain rehabilitation program and I realized all the different ways social workers can help people bounce back with resilience. This experience taught me that social workers did not have to heal or fix the entire web of problems to create positive change in a client’s life.
• My dream is to be the director of an art-based community intervention program or non-profit. I’d also love to be a community lecturer for the College of Social Work for a course we are trying to create called Art & Resilience or any other course that incorporates creative interventions in groups and communities.
• My greatest accomplishment in my undergraduate career was winning first place in the Denman Undergraduate Research Forum’s Human Experience category for the collage art trauma reprocessing group therapy technique I developed and tested as a part of my thesis. Receiving first place in a category that is usually dominated by psychology, education, and public health felt like an incredible win for the College of Social Work, not just for me. Since this was the first time we have won the Denman, I hope my recognition can show other fields that we are powerful researchers as well.
• I want to increase access to therapeutic services and preventative support systems for vulnerable communities through arts engagement. Trauma is the underlying factor of most of the cases we work with yet we have few effective trauma treatments that are culturally responsive for the groups of people facing the greatest marginalization.
• My favorite thing about the College of Social Work is that everyone who works there, including staff and faculty, cares deeply about each student’s success. They also want to set us up for success by providing financial support, career planning, and seeing us as humans rather than just cogs in an academic system. Because I used to work at Student Life Disability Services,  I can say hands down that the College of Social Work cares the most about their students compared to any other college or department at OSU. This is especially true for “non-traditional” students as the College of Social Work destroys the notion of trying to fit students into boxes and standardized career paths.