BI Norwegian Business School

Student life at any institution is shaped less by prospectus language than by ordinary mechanics: how the teaching week is arranged, whether courses lean on lectures or on group work, how far students travel to reach class, and what happens once teaching stops for the day. None of that is visible from the outside, and it can differ between programmes within the same institution. The practical step is to ask the student services office at BI Norwegian Business School what a normal teaching week looks like on the programme you are considering, and whether new students are given an introductory period before teaching begins. The general patterns behind all of this are gathered in our notes on what shapes student life.

Beyond timetables, ask who actually organises social life. At some institutions clubs and sport sit with the institution itself; elsewhere they belong to a separate student association that you join yourself, and those arrangements feel quite different in practice. Ask which applies here, whether facilities are open to every enrolled student, and how students on your programme tend to meet each other outside class. It is also worth establishing which language your programme is taught in and which language routine administration uses, since those are not always the same and both affect daily life. Settling into an unfamiliar place takes deliberate effort, and finding a circle of people is usually slower than students expect.

Accommodation is the part of a move that punishes a late start. Establish whether the institution allocates housing itself, whether it works alongside a separate housing organisation, or whether students are expected to find a place on the open market. Ask when applications open, whether an offer of study has to be in hand before you can apply, and what happens if you accept a place after the housing round has closed. Admissions or student services staff can say which of these applies, and guesswork here is expensive in time rather than in effort. Our general notes on arranging student housing cover the questions that apply wherever you go.

Then establish the practicalities that decide whether a room actually works: what the agreement covers, what is included and what is billed separately, how long it runs and what happens over holiday periods, what deposit arrangements look like and how a deposit is returned, and whether the room comes furnished. Ask how long the journey to teaching takes from the accommodation on offer, because a room that looks convenient on a map may not be. A student arriving from another country should also ask the international office what has to be completed before travelling and what can wait. A step-by-step version of all this sits in our housing guide.

An applicant arriving from another country has to establish a set of categories rather than a set of facts. Which entry, residence and registration formalities apply to your own situation, and which authority decides them. Whether health cover is arranged before or after arrival, and by whom. Whether the qualifications you already hold need assessment or translation before an application can be considered, and who carries that out. Whether working alongside study is available to you. Every one of those has an official answer that depends on your circumstances, so put each to the institution's international office and to the relevant official authority rather than to a forum, an agent or this page.

Language is worth settling early, because it shapes everything else: which language your teaching and your assessment take place in, and which language you will be dealing with when you register, set up the accounts you need or write to administrative staff. Ask the international office directly, programme by programme. It is also sensible to ask what support exists for students who arrive without local contacts, whether there is a named person to write to when something goes wrong, and how long official processes tend to take, so that you can plan backwards from the start of teaching. Preparing for a move abroad covers the sequencing.

This page carries no entry criteria, because they belong to the institution, differ from programme to programme and are revised between intakes. The reliable route is the institution's own admissions pages for the programme and the intake you are interested in, read in full rather than skimmed, and then the admissions office itself for anything those pages leave ambiguous. If you were educated in another system, ask specifically how what you already hold will be looked at, and by whom, before assuming that anything transfers automatically.

It helps to write down what you actually need to know and to ask for it plainly: where applications are submitted, what the shape of the cycle is, what documentation is expected and in what form, whether anything has to be certified or translated, and what happens once an application is filed. Keep a copy of everything you send and note when you sent it. If a claim about entry appears somewhere other than the institution's own site, including here, treat it as a prompt to check rather than as information you can rely on.

No fee figure appears on this page, and that is deliberate. Amounts are set by the institution, they are revised, and they can differ by programme, by mode of study and by the category an applicant is placed in, so anything reproduced here would risk being wrong for the person reading it. What can be said is what to look at carefully. An amount shown on a page may be tuition, or it may be a registration charge for a semester, and those are not the same thing. Whether a student is charged at all may depend on the category the institution places them in, which is something to confirm rather than to assume in either direction.

So treat the institution's own fee pages for the year you would start as the source that counts, and ask admissions or the international office to confirm which category applies to you before you budget anything. Ask what a published amount covers, what period it covers, whether anything is payable separately, when it falls due and what happens if your circumstances change. Fees are also only part of the picture, since living costs sit alongside them and are not set by the institution at all. Checking official fee pages sets out a method for doing this properly.