Copenhagen Business School

It is more useful to think about a student week than about student life. A week is made of fixed things: scheduled teaching, independent work, travel between the places you have to be, and whatever paid or family commitments you already carry. Those fixed parts determine what is left over, and they are decided at programme level, which is why one institution can produce very different experiences depending on what is studied. Ask the programme office how teaching is delivered, how much of the week it accounts for and how much is left to you. Adjusting to a way of teaching you have not met before is worth reading whichever answer you get.

What fills the remainder is assembled rather than provided. Ask the students' organisation and student services what groups, sport and volunteering exist, whether any of it is tied to a particular course, how people join and when. Ask in the same message what support exists for students who run into difficulty, who is entitled to use it and whether anything must be arranged beforehand. An office answering those questions tells you more than any description of atmosphere, including this one.

Accommodation deserves attention earlier than most applicants give it, because it is the part of the plan with the least flexibility. Begin by establishing what the institution's role is, since the possibilities are genuinely different from each other: allocating rooms directly, holding a limited stock for particular groups, listing providers without arranging anything, or leaving the matter entirely to students. The accommodation or student services office is the authority on that, and the answer determines how the rest of the search should be run.

If some form of student accommodation is involved, ask how places are decided, whether an offer of a course place has to be confirmed before a room can be requested, and what a student who arrives without a room usually does. What living in shared student accommodation is generally like is a fair guide to the questions worth asking, though only the institution can say which of them apply here and on what timetable.

On the private market the questions are the ordinary ones of renting somewhere unfamiliar: what an agreement commits you to, what is payable before the keys change hands, how a deposit is held and recovered, what is charged in addition to the rent, and who is responsible for repairs. Never commit money to a place nobody you trust has seen, and where you will be sharing, settle how bills and responsibilities are divided before moving in. The general order of a housing search is much the same wherever it happens, and the local detail belongs to the accommodation office.

Someone applying from another country is assembling answers in several areas at once, and each belongs to a different holder. Academic recognition of what you have already studied belongs to the institution, as does whatever it accepts as evidence that you can follow the teaching. Permission to enter, to remain and to do anything else while you are there belongs to the relevant official authority, whose position can differ by individual circumstance and which no institution, agent or website can state on its behalf. Health cover, registration after arrival and the practical business of banking and proving an address form a third group, usually handled around the point of arrival.

Language belongs in its own category, because the language of a programme, the language of its administration and the languages in use around you are separate questions that need not have the same answer. Establish each for your own case rather than inferring one from another. Put questions to the international office in writing, describing your own situation rather than a hypothetical one, keep the dated replies, and confirm anything with official consequences with the authority responsible. The experience of arriving somewhere unfamiliar is a different subject from paperwork, but it turns up at the same time and is better read in advance.

No requirements, closing dates, tests or rates appear on this page. They are set by the institution for each programme, each level and each category of applicant, and they are revised without any obligation to tell a third-party page that has copied them. Reproducing them here would simply put another out-of-date version into circulation.

The way to find what applies to you is to narrow first and read second. Establish the exact programme and level, locate that programme on the institution's official admissions pages, and follow it to the route that matches your own background, which is often documented separately for applicants educated elsewhere. Treat the official page as the position and your own notes as a summary that may already have been overtaken.

It is also worth asking about the process itself rather than only about criteria: how an application is submitted, what is expected in support of it, how and when decisions are communicated, and what happens to an applicant whose circumstances do not fit the standard categories. Admissions offices deal with those questions constantly, and a short exchange in advance usually prevents a much longer one later.

This page states no amount, and it will not characterise one either, since a characterisation is only an unverified figure with the digits removed. U4S publishes a fee where the institution's own page gives it together with the level of study, the category of student, the currency, the period covered and the academic year it belongs to. What can be said here is what to watch for. Whether a student is charged at all may depend on the category the institution places them in, so a published amount may simply not be addressed to you; and where an amount is shown, it may cover a period shorter than a year, which makes a single figure easy to misread in either direction.

Both of those are things to check rather than things to assume, and neither is a description of how anything is arranged. The place to check them is the institution's own fee pages, read for your level and mode of study and for the year you would actually be starting, with attention to who the figure is written for, what period it covers and how the institution determines the category you fall into. Where that determination rests on status rather than on the course, the relevant official authority is the one to confirm it with. The questions worth asking before any money moves cover what an applicant is entitled to have in writing.