Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

Whatever shapes student life, it is rarely the thing a prospectus leads with. It is the timetable, the amount of independent work between classes, how far apart the places you need to be are, and whether the people on your programme stay together through the year or reassemble differently for each class. Those conditions decide how much room there is for anything else, and they differ between programmes under the same roof, so a description pitched at the level of the whole institution would flatten exactly what a reader wants to know.

What can be established is the machinery around it. Ask what student organisations exist and how someone new gets into them, what the students' representative body does, and what help is there for a student who falls behind, who becomes unwell, or who needs adjustments in order to study. Ask, too, who a student turns to when a term goes badly and how quickly that person can be reached, which is often the question a parent actually wants answered. The wellbeing section sets out the kinds of support most institutions have in some form, which at least supplies the vocabulary for asking.

Accommodation is the part of a move that hardens fastest. Ask early whether the institution houses students itself; if it does, who qualifies to apply, on what basis rooms are given out, whether that application runs separately from the one to study, and what people do when they are not offered anything. The accommodation office holds those answers, and they set the shape of every decision that follows.

If the private rental market is where you end up looking, treat it as a market you do not know yet. What is expected at signing, how deposits are held and returned, what is billed on top of rent, how long an agreement runs and how it ends: all of that varies, and none of it is safely guessed at from another country. The housing section covers the checks that renting in person supplies for free and that renting at a distance quietly removes.

Arranging early is worth more than any particular tip about where to look. Options do not vanish as term approaches so much as thin out, leaving longer journeys, shorter agreements and arrangements that would have been turned down with time in hand. Beginning while you can still say no is the whole of the advantage.

For an applicant coming from elsewhere, the work divides into categories with different holders. Arriving and remaining are settled by the official body that governs them, and nothing said by a university office changes that answer. Whether a qualification already held is recognised belongs to admissions, possibly alongside a national recognition body. Which language a programme is taught in, and which language its administration runs in, are questions for the institution and are worth asking separately. Health cover, registration after arrival and everyday banking usually sit outside the university.

The international office is the contact that can tell you which categories apply to you and in roughly what order they are normally handled, and it deals with these questions constantly. Where a question is not the university's to answer, the relevant authority's reply is the only one that counts, and it is worth having in writing rather than by summary. Working in a language you are still learning deals with the daily side of this, which arrives at the same time as the paperwork and is easier if it has been thought about beforehand.

There is no general admissions answer, because what applies depends on the qualification held, where it was awarded, the level applied for and the programme itself. Those interact, which is why a general answer offered by anyone other than the institution is worth distrusting on principle. The published routes on the institution's own admissions pages are the authority, and its admissions office resolves the combinations the published material does not reach.

So narrow first, then read: the programme, the level, the category the institution places you in, and only the material written for that combination. None of that detail is reproduced here, because criteria and dates decay without leaving any visible sign of having decayed, and a reader acting on a stale copy has no way of telling that it is stale. How anything on this site is checked, and what it refuses to state, is described on the sources and methodology page.

No price appears in this section, and the omission is the point. Fee pages get revised, they differ by level and by category, and they are reproduced inaccurately by sites that summarise them for convenience. Putting one of those copies here would place a plausible-looking figure in front of a reader with nothing behind it, which is worse for that reader than leaving the space open.

There is also a particular trap to avoid. It may be the case that what a programme costs varies with the language it is taught in, and that the rate applying to any given student follows from the category the institution places them in. Neither can be worked out from the outside, and an amount quoted without both settled is an amount that might belong to somebody else entirely.

The figure that is actually yours is on the institution's own fee pages for the relevant academic year, and whatever those pages leave ambiguous belongs with the office that publishes them. Fees set against the cost of living is worth reading alongside them, because a fee page on its own answers only part of what a family is usually trying to work out.