Iranian Graduate Student Association

About Iranian Graduate Student Association

IGSA is a non-political, non-religious, voluntary student organization whose objective is to sponsor Iranian social and cultural activities and events, to promote an understanding of Iranian culture, to help foster friendship among different cultural groups, and to provide a source of support and information in order to serve the needs and interests of Iranian students and post-doctorial researchers and their dependents at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
We try to address a broad range of audience. One group consists of the graduate students who have been born and raised in Iran, as a result of which are very familiar to the Iranian culture. Another group is the Iranian-American students who have mostly been born and raised in the states. People of this group know a little bit about Iran and the Iranian culture, but certainly not as much as the first group. With this group comes a third group that are mostly the parents of these Iranina-American students, the Iranians in the Santa Barbara community, who have been around for many years and are very familiar with Iranian culture. Another group is the people from departments like Middle-Eastern studies, Religious studies, Global studies, Anthropology, etc. The people of this group mainly have academic knowledge of Iran and would probably be interested to see more and experience it themselves. And finally, we have numerous American, European, East Asian, etc. friends at UCSB and in the community that we hope to reach and be able to introduce Iran and Iranian culture to them.