 Hi everyone. My name is Sahar. I am going to present you this webinar on Emmett's International Management of MENA. I'd like to welcome you all to this webinar and I hope you enjoy the next 20-25 minutes of the talk. Of course you are more than welcome to post any questions that you have on the little chat box which should be appearing on your screens and then I can go through that and answer some of those questions at the end of the presentation. So to begin with, let me tell you what we're going to do mostly today, what we'll talk about, essentially to provide you with an overall background to SOAS, to the School of Finance and Management which is essentially the department that you probably have an interest in and also the department which hosts this MSc International Management of the Middle East and North Africa. And then we move on to focus mainly on the program itself, how it's run, how it's delivered, what are different components of it and all the other details which could be relevant to you. So let's start and as I mentioned you can be more than welcome to put your questions down and we'll cover them at the end of the seminar. So let's start with a bit of a background to SOAS. You probably most of you already are familiar with the school. It's the School of Oriental and African Studies which focuses on the study of humanities and social sciences and languages mainly relating to Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East. Not only through a generic sort of global approach to it but also through provision of region-specific knowledge and expertise. It has a central London location where if you look at us on the map we're right in the middle of London close to not only the key sort of perhaps to the size that you'd be interested in but also more importantly we are very closely located with universities such as LSE, King's College London and UCL and Birkbeck which is great because that means that you not only are part of the SOAS community but you also are part of these universities in London which are very closely knit and you can attend seminars and events in those other places and create collaborations with them. The other thing which is quite unique to SOAS is that it's a pretty small campus of 6,300 students and what that means is that on the one hand there is this very strong community field which is what I always hear from our students at SOAS but it also means that it's quite easy to maneuver your way around the school and also to get to know other departments and other students who are starting a very wide range of degrees and in some cases develop interests or have a chance to essentially explore other field on individual field of study. More than half of our students are from outside of the UK so they are from Europe but also from Asia, Africa, Middle East and North Africa and the Latin America or North America which is great diversity at SOAS and despite this kind of diverse range of the students that we have there is always a number of things which binds them together and those kind of common idea including a sense of curiosity for things which is just beyond Europe beyond your place of birth necessarily or beyond the boundaries of the country that you come from and this desire to get to know other cultures, other languages and it is that sense of when I wanted to explore what is just beyond your immediate interest and comfort zones and look at the rest of the world and not having things such as sort of a Eurocentric perhaps being a London perspective on various topics and also kind of reading widely the literature which comes from other regions of the world. So these are some elements to which SOAS, one last point is that SOAS offers this fantastic range of events which all the students are able to attend on a daily basis multiple events whether it's from departments such as music department in terms of concerts and talks to panel discussions organized by the economics department, politics, school of finance and management as I'll mention later on and this is a very important element of sort of a student experience here whereby many students are able to actually explore well beyond just the immediate course of the study. I have put a link here that you can click just to see the range of kind of events that we have as SOAS on a daily basis. Now let's move to talk a little bit about the school of finance and management where as I mentioned this MSc program is hosted the department is a leading center globally in Europe at the world level for researching the areas of finance and management in particular and it's a as many as departments at SOAS is to provide a theoretically and empirically rich understanding of finance and management at the global level but then what really is the department beyond other similar departments in Europe or in the US is that it offers this regional specialty on these topics relating to finance and management through its emphasis on Asia, Africa, Middle East and North Africa and that's really sort of where the departments strength come in that it not only covers all the basic kind of information and discussions and theoretical level relating to the topics that you'll be covering such as international management but it extends it beyond to specific regional specialties. I'll go into a bit more detail on that when we talk about the program itself. We have a number of research centers at the School of Finance and Management including the Center for Global Finance, Center for Trust Research and an important project on inclusive finance. I will so I'm going to talk about this Center for Global Finance in a second but these research centers essentially focus mainly on providing very specialized research. I will also talk to you a little bit about finance and management seminar series and also business network seminar series which we hold at the department on a weekly basis and again it's open to all the students to participate in. Now let's move to one of these centers which is our latest research center that we have set up and it's one of the most active ones in the department and it's called the Center for Global Finance. It's been set up at the back of a rich level of funding from the Economic and Social Research Council and basically what this center does as an example of a research center it focuses on research mega trends in the global finance and their impact on development in the international finance system and the world economy as a whole. So they try to kind of create these understandings of these inter-linkages between finance stability and growth. The center is headed by Professor Victor Morente and they offer every year a number of MFA and Pichu students to come and join them. As I mentioned I have this really interesting seminar series on a weekly basis where they write external speakers in the field in relevant areas to give us a talk and it's one of those seminars which are quite popular by a lot of our students. Now let's move on to the program that you are more specifically interested in and that's the MFA International Management in the Middle East and North Africa. So I'll tell you a little bit about the program itself. So it's convened by two people, myself Saharad and Professor Basa Fattu and so we are essentially responsible for those students who are undertaking this program. I myself am an economist, we experience outside of academia as an economist working for the UN for a number of years before coming back to academia and Professor Fattu, he's apart from being of course a professor at our department, he's also the head of the Oxford University's Energy Institute. Now the focus of the program is to try and emphasis management as environmental characteristics in the context of the media region. So within this we try to analyze key aspects of media business environment and management practice. So in a sense if you like we try to position media within the global management perspective but also have specific analysis conducted on understanding the dynamics of management practices and notions and approaches within the region itself. So throughout the course of your studies and I will take you through them that you will be conducting a number of core modules that you have to take as well as elective modules, optional modules. Now the purpose of the core ones which are essentially your compulsory modules are to give you the principles and applications of international management and to get an understanding of this interplay interaction between the global and local factors influencing for example management in the media region. When it comes to optional modules which are the modules that you can choose, you can either choose modules which give you some management skills that you can apply in the future to various scenarios and various workplaces or you can choose modules which give you specialized knowledge in terms of understanding regional business environments around the world. And I'll come back to this in a second. And let's go back to sort of the overall aim of the program. So on the one hand the program will give you this body of knowledge in the content areas such as international management broadly speaking. So two of your core modules will be kind of quite concentrated understanding your conceptual frameworks, macro pictures when it comes to international management and so on. At the same time you want to develop a skills that differentiate the influence of local and global actors in different regional settings. So in this case you will have a body of knowledge which would be very specific to the media region. At the same time as we saw us we would like to encourage you to develop critical thinking about some existing assumptions in international management when it comes to certain regions of the world such as the Middle East and North Africa. So we try to kind of understand how those topics are being looked at at the international level but then try and sort of criticize them and evaluate them. We also try to equip the students where we can with to research their own organizations or be able to have the skills to work as managers and consultants in other organizations later on once they graduate. And here is some of those practical kind of skills which come in handy such as for instance through writing assignments and doing presentations to develop effective communication skills to have a good research skill set that you hopefully arrive at by the end of your degree the ability to be able to present your ideas well to be able to listen articulate ideas and argue and and be able to have that critical thinking. Now overall what you need is 180 credits you need to complete 180 credits during your MSc program. Now that is divided into four core modules so you have to undertake four compulsory modules each of them have 15 credits adding up to 60 and then four optional modules which again each of them add up to 15 percent adding up to an overall 60 units. And then you have a dissertation which you're submitting at the end of your degree and that on its own as one piece of work has 60 credits attached to it. Now what are these core modules and optional modules let's look at them in a bit more detail. So to begin with on the top you have the dissertation which as I mentioned has about 60 percent in terms of credit. I will talk you through a little bit more detail about what the dissertation is. It's an important piece of work as a standalone item and as you see it's going to has a high amount of credit associated with it. Then you have four core modules so these are compulsory modules if you take this program two of them research methods in management and international management they are broader they focus beyond the media region they give you the basic framework and the important frameworks that you need to have in mind if you want to study international management. And then you have two regional modules management perspectives and sexual issues in media and economic business and institutional environment of the media which are very much specific of course to the media region and those two are delivered by myself and Bassa. Now so you this page everything on it you have to undertake and then from the next page these are your optional modules that you have to choose a number of so you have to choose four modules from this list. The list sometimes varies slightly from year to year and that is mainly due to the fact that sometimes the colleagues who are teaching a particular course it might be on research leave or we might have new courses which are being added etc but more or less this is the kind of picked the types of modules which are available for you to choose from. Of course sometimes you might want to say well I want to do something more to do with media so you go and choose one of your as one of your optional modules is like banking and finance. Sometimes we've had media students who want to go into businesses which deal between media and China so then they go on and study a module like topics in the Chinese economy whereas if you want to kind of study more broader topics such as corporate governance corporate finance cross cultural management then you can choose other ones and of course you can see that some of them are offered in term one and in term two so the idea is that in term one you do two compulsory modules two optional modules and similarly in term two you select two optional modules and two compulsory ones. Now I think maybe let me talk to you about some of the topics that we cover in our core modules which are focused on media just to give you a flavor of you know whatever types of discussions you're having. So for instance in the two menial modules that we have in term one and term two we cover issues such as state business relations. Middle East and North Africa as we probably already know is one of those regions of the world where you have a heavy state involvement in every sphere of the economy. So from the central bank to the state owning some of the largest businesses and some of the largest companies etc. So it's very important to understand the type of state business relations which exist in the region and of course what we do is that we want to say that there is no one type of a state business relations across the region. So if you look at countries such as Saudi Arabia the way in which the state and the business relate to one another are quite different from an economy such as Tunisia which is much smaller non-oil based a lot more private sector economic activity. We also cover the issue of privatization something which has been a slow and uneven in the middle region but changing over time. We look at the region's attractiveness in terms of foreign direct investment and how political risk is one of those issues which has prevented certain foreign investors from coming into the region. We look at the important issues such as institution and business environment, corporate governance. Importantly we also focus on labor markets and human resource management because again the middle region is one of those regions of the world which has the highest levels of youth and female employment and it generally has very high levels of unemployment. So it's very important to be aware of the implications of that for international management or when you are discussing things such as human resource management. Again huge differentiations between countries of the region. So you have again a country like Kuwait where you have most of your workers being non-nationals foreign nationals and then you have a country like Egypt or Iran where it's mainly dealing with large populations of national workers. So again very different implications for that. We also emphasis issues such as entrepreneurship, the rise of small and medium-sized enterprises, corporate social responsibility and then dedicated lectures and discussions to important topics such as oil and gas markets and the business activities there, financial markets as an important part of the services sector for businesses and also looking at trade agreements and trade performance across the various countries of the region. Now what is our teaching method in the student profiles? So normally we have lectures so between your core modules and optional modules you normally have a one or two hour lecture. It depends on the modules some of them are shorter than others and it's always combined with a seminar later in the week where you have a chance to discuss what has been taught in the lecture plus discuss the readings that you have done and in most cases or in a lot of the modules students are expected to also give a presentation. The approach to teaching across the department as is across so as is quite multidisciplinary which basically means that we look at a problem or an issue or a topic from multiple disciplinary angles. So for example if I'm looking at the oil markets in the region I don't only look at the growth lens of economics or finance but I also look at the political economy of the oil sector I look at the politics of the oil sector etc. So it's going to bring in that approach to complete in a sense complete the picture that we're trying to understand and analyze and of course we try to both combine theoretical as well as empirical depth. So each of the lectures will provide you with a theoretical basis and combine that with an empirical level of analysis in terms of cases studies and examples from various regions of the world. Our class sizes are generally small compared to other similar universities which provides an excellent opportunity for us to provide a platform for our students to engage with us much more closely. So class discussions are often a lot more active because we have a smaller groups and everyone is passionate to get involved. During the lecture also the smaller numbers allow for students to feel more comfortable to ask questions from the lecture as the lecture goes by and generally there's a lot more attention which we can provide to our students. We also provide reading this so every module will have this or reading this where you have a suggested number of readings from books to articles to a lot of sources that you need to cover as you go along in your studies. Now the assessment methods are something else which is important to mention so how do we assess students throughout the year? We normally have essays most modules have essays we should need to submit to the convener at the end of the course and then we have exams which will take place at the end of the year around May or June so we don't have any exams in the middle of the year. In addition some modules also have about 10% of the module which come from a presentation that you make during the seminar or during tutorial. So it's a combination of essays, exams and presentations. What is our typical student profile? In a way I must say we don't have a typical student profile we just have a very diverse range of students some have an interest to come and do a degree which will benefit their career and some want to carry on doing research in that field so they're more research focused. Some of our students have professional experience some of them come straight off the university with professional experience so again we design our courses in a way which would cater a middle point there so that we benefit everyone. Now what we have normally actually for the meaner region in particular a large number of students or the kind of a relatively large number of students who come from family businesses or to go back and use a degree to run or take up a position within their family business someone to go on and establish their own enterprises and someone to go on and do a PhD or another master's program in a related topic so it's pretty diverse groups that we have. Let me tell you something about the dissertation so the dissertation is this one-off module at the end of your course which essentially you don't have lectures for or anything it's a long list of writing that you need to do so normally essays are about 2500 or 3000 words those are the normal size essays you do throughout the course but for dissertation it's 10,000 words and dissertation is worth a third of your final mark and it's also quite important because the mark that you get for your dissertation to some extent can have a huge influence on the class of your degree that normally you propose you discuss a potential topic with your potential supervisor and in terms of two of your studies you have to suggest and submit what your proposed topic for your dissertation is and you also get an allocated supervisor then you can start meeting with your supervisors you're normally required to meet with them three times and by instead of around mid-junior you are supposed to have had all your meetings with your supervisor and essentially then it's been summer writing your dissertation with the view to submit it in around mid-September when the deadline is now maybe I've finished some on some career prospects so what's the advantage of doing this MS international management with the reference to media region especially also at a place like so much so what this program does is that it provides you not only the basic knowledge that you would have if you studied international management anywhere else but also this regional specialization on top of it and these days in international competitive job market if you have something which is a bit more specialized a bit more niche that normally gives you an advantage over others who are interested in other candidates who are applying for the same job and this is one of the main benefits that our students who go on to get jobs come back and tell us that you know it was that sort of regional speciality which really get paid them that edge over everyone else kind of a more of a global outlook if you like rather than for example someone who's done international management based purely on kind of the studies of the European economies or the British economy most students go into finance business or management sectors but we also have a lot of students who go and work for international companies regional companies organizations so this could be within certain industries like the oil industry or in the textile industry management positions or organized international organizations such as the United Nations or the World Bank and we also have a number of students who historically have gone on to set up their own enterprises in the region so for example last year one of our students at the moment is set up his own enterprise in the US where he came from and to work with health related companies and health service providers in Iraq and Turkey so we have a lot of students who kind of do that they go on and set up smaller medium-sized enterprises we also have the students who go into international consultancy so for example going and working for companies such as McKinsey international McKinsey is in particular is quite popular to provide basically very highly skilled research work for them so then you'd be assigned to certain regions of the world in this case most likely the minor region and maybe even specifically to certain countries and we have then for students who go on to study further so they pursue a PhD program within the department so I think that's all I want to say at the moment thank you good luck with whatever your future choice is hopefully it'll be so as but whatever that choice is going to be if you have any questions from us of course my email and Basam's email was on one of the first slides but on top of it we have these are the contacts of the key people living in our departmental office these are not academic members of the staff but colleagues who can help you if you have questions about joining the department or different study routes that you want to take at some moment so far so I think I will finish it here and please email me if you have any questions and I think we have one question in our chat box from Claudia nice to meet you Claudia so I read out Claudia's question she's asking if I don't speak Arabic what is the likelihood that I would be able to understand well Islamic banking and find a job related to it it's a very relevant question and a very important one so knowing Arabic is not a requirement for being able to complete this degree so of course if you do speak Arabic it gives you an advantage because you can read some of the material that would be available also in Arabic articles etc however to finish our courses and complete them successfully you don't need that because all the courses are taught in Arabic and most and all the material that we provide to you are in English so in that sense you don't have to worry about that Islamic banking the same thing again all the concepts will be explained very well to you and you don't have to be worried about kind of completing it now finding a job that's a different question it depends on whether you want that job to be in the minor region or outside of the region of course English is the most important asset for you to have now if you're operating in the region a lot of the companies these days they're working languages English of course needless to say if you do have Arabic it will help you gel more closely with the country that you're living in if it happens to be in the region and also for you to integrate better sometimes some jobs would require you specifically to have Arabic as a second language but it's not a strict requirement so I would not say that it's would be an obstacle to doubt second question we have from Simo nice to meet you again would this program be useful for a student with a Middle East studies background IR that is interested in the intersection of social enterprise and NGO work also a few in the Arabic speaker so well you take a lot of boxes I think it's definitely your background in Middle East studies with an IR international relations would help your understanding of the economic aspects and business and management aspects of the region why as we all know of course MENA is a region of the world where economics is closely associated with politics unfortunately or fortunately I don't know which one it is but so if you know the totality of some issues with international relations which relate to the region or if you have a set of Middle East studies it would provide you some of that background information to then come on board and get into completely sort of with that regional knowledge that you have to get into the economics business and management side of topics that we teach and I think this issue of an intersection of social enterprise and NGO is quite interesting we do as I mentioned sort of a few lectures which are dedicated to entrepreneurship development in the Arab world we also but also Turkey Iran we also focus on the rise of social enterprises after or enterprises in general after the Arab Spring and we also focus on issues such as corporate social responsibility and so on. So NGOs specifically there are issues that you know we are quite linked to them which we discuss even though we don't have a direct focus on NGOs themselves but it's going to be look at the overall institutional business environment within which such enterprises operate. Now we have a question from Marta she's asking will SOAS provide partners we can work for? Are there partnerships between the university and some companies and a second question will all exams be at the end of term two? So second question to be answered yes so all the exams so of course you have modules which are for one term and you study them in term one you submit an essay for them at the end of term one so kind of around Christmas time and but then you will sit for the exam for that module at the end of term two. It's a little bit of a challenge but what we do normally to help with that is to provide in term three we have a short term three which is after the Easter break you provide revision classes and those revision classes will go over the topics that we have already taught in term one so that's an opportunity for you to kind of refresh your mind about the stuff that you have read in term one before you sit for the exam. On the question of resource provide partners we can work for it's a very good question it's something that our department is trying to expand on so we don't have a formal partnership with other companies that we could sort of put our graduates a straight away onto internships or into various placements however each member of the staff they have a wide network of connections within either international development organizations the corporate sector international backing etc that they are more than happy to suggest to their students or make the connections for their students and sometimes it's proven to be even a bit more effective than normal placement schemes because those are students who for example I am recommending a student of mine to a colleague of mine at the UN it comes as a personal recommendation so sometimes it's a lot more effective and it can result in more long-term involvement of that a student with a particular organization. Of course we have a lot of collaborations with other universities where if you want to go on to attend classes or attend seminars at or think about doing further research in terms of a PhD program or an MPH program we're more than happy to facilitate those. Sima is saying that she has a last question which is absolutely fine you're more than welcome to ask more is it possible to work and complete the program part-time is that an option perhaps finish the program in a year and a half if necessary yes so you can complete the program on a part-time basis normally it will then be run over two years and that means that essentially you'll be doing half of the modules every year as you're expected on a full-time program to complete so in that sense you you can most likely kind of be over two years it's possible to discuss the option of for example the starting part-time and then switching to full-time or starting full-time and then switching to part-time as well and that might allow you a midway point of you know one and a half years but that is something that I would encourage you to discuss with the colleagues who are on the screen their names Richard the story or Ania Kropvich because they can then discuss with you various formats of studies that you can take. Marta has asked a follow-up question which is that so for every Excel we have an essay to write at the end of the module and then the oral part so so this is how it happens let's say you're doing a module on economics of the media region so let me go back to where we had put the modules I'm sure you can still see them on the screen so here we are so let's say under the core modules you're doing management perspectives and central issues in the Middle East and North Africa now you have 10 lectures for this you have one term of the study of this throughout that one term in one of the seminars you will be allocated to do a presentation so you give a presentation to the class for about 20-30 minutes that would count as 10 percent of your overall mark and then you will have to at the end of the course so come December for example you submit an essay and that essay which is normally 2,500 words we provide a number of topics questions to you that you can choose one and write an essay on and that counts for about 30 percent and then you have a final exam which will be about 60 percent of the overall mark for that module so your total mark will come from a combination of what you get for your presentation what mark you get for your essay and what mark you get for the exam I hope that's clear sort of how the whole thing is combined Claudia is asking would there be an MRes course that could lead to PhD international management of MENA I think we do have an MRes course I am not sure of the details of it in terms of what requirements you need to have in order to complete it in terms of what types of modules you need to take and how it kind of how it varies exactly from the current one but again I am more than happy to get this information for you or I would suggest that you contact Richard Astori our departmental manager to send you exactly the kind of degree program that you would be studying in terms of your you know wanting a research based essentially for those of you who don't know MRes is a research based a master's program which can lead into a PhD program so that's something that I would encourage you Claudia to check with our departmental manager so that you can get a whole set of the requirements and what the module looks like etc we have a question from Marta talking about work again will there be events in which we can meet some companies and eventually get in touch with them for a future job and internship a career day for instance absolutely so SOT has a careers office so that that's at the SOWAS level where they a number of times a year they bring companies and and firms and international organizations to represent themselves so our students can interact with them now they always have a large cohort of companies who come in specifically with an interest in economics business and management and and those are excellent opportunities actually for our students to meet some of these companies and potentially explore future job opportunities but again because our students have such a varied range of interest in terms of what they want to do with their degrees afterwards sometimes it's also a matter of coming and discussing your specific interests and the type of companies you want to work with with your shooters so you will be assigned a personal tutor for your entire year which will be one of the academic members of the staff most likely since you'll be studying in the region it'll be myself or bathroom so you can one of the functions of having a tutor is that you can go to them at a personal level and say well I'm interested in these areas do you know anyone or how do you think I should go about approaching these organizations with a view to get employment with them in a future so absolutely there is both school-wide activities which you can do but also at a personal level you can get a lot of options through your tutors well if there is no more questions then I would say good luck and of course as I said I'm always available for any further questions through email and look forward to speaking through and to you through email later on as you make your applications thank you and goodbye