Management and Persian

Management and Persian is an unusual pairing that opens a genuinely distinctive intellectual and professional horizon. Management at degree level is concerned with how organisations function and are led, covering areas such as marketing, organisational behaviour, financial analysis, and strategy. Persian, one of the world's great literary languages, is spoken by around 110 million people across Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, and carries a poetic and intellectual tradition of extraordinary richness, spanning Rumi, Hafiz, Omar Khayyam, and a continuous literary culture stretching from antiquity to the present.

Combining the two gives you both the analytical toolkit of management education and linguistic and cultural access to a region of growing strategic and economic importance.

At St Andrews this four-year full-time programme includes a year abroad, essential for developing genuine proficiency in Persian and for experiencing the cultures and academic environments of Persian-speaking regions. The management component will introduce you to a variety of organisations across all sectors of the economy, teaching techniques specific to the discipline including marketing, organisational behaviour, and financial analysis. It will develop interpersonal skills in problem-solving, critical thinking, and self-reliance, empowering you to interrogate evidence, challenge received wisdom, and question established management practices.

The Persian component develops your linguistic proficiency alongside engagement with the literature, history, and intellectual traditions of the Persianate world.

Graduates find careers in international business, diplomacy, area studies research, development organisations, journalism, translation, and management roles in organisations with interests in Central and South Asia and the Middle East. The combination of management training and Persian linguistic expertise is genuinely rare and positions graduates strongly in a range of competitive roles. Many also continue to postgraduate study in Iranian studies, management, international relations, or Central Asian studies.