EPFL — École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Students at the same institution can have entirely different weeks, and the reasons are mundane: the programme's teaching pattern, how assessment is distributed, the journey between accommodation and teaching, and whether paid work or family commitments take a fixed share of the week. Judge those against your own circumstances rather than against a general impression of the place, which will not tell you much about how your own week would run.

The questions to put to student services and to the student association are concrete. What societies, sport and volunteering actually operate, and how does someone join? What academic, welfare and disability support exists, who may use it, and does any of it need arranging ahead of time? What happens during the induction period, and is any of it optional in name only? How do students usually travel to teaching? The answers are specific to the institution and given freely when asked. The general anatomy of a student week is much the same most places, and worth reading alongside.

It is worth deciding in advance what you will do when the first hard stretch arrives, because it arrives for nearly everyone and rarely at a convenient moment. Knowing the name of the office you would contact, and having one regular commitment each week that is not study, are unglamorous preparations, but they are the ones that tend to hold when other things do not.

Start on accommodation as soon as the process allows, before an offer if that is possible, because it is the one item on your list whose timing you cannot compress. Establish whether the institution offers or brokers housing at all, whether that is a separate application with its own timetable, and what the accommodation office suggests for someone arriving from another country. Ask them plainly what most people in your position actually do, and take the answer seriously.

In the private market, read what you are committing to before any money moves: the term of the agreement, what is payable in advance and under what conditions it comes back, who repairs what, and how disagreements are settled. Never pay for something that has not been seen by you or by someone you trust. If you will be sharing, agree how costs and chores are divided at the start, since money between flatmates is the thing that most often turns a workable share into an unworkable one.

Arriving from another country means running several processes at once, and each of them belongs to somebody other than this page. Entry and residence permission belongs to the relevant official authority. Recognition of the qualification you already hold belongs to the admissions and international offices, and sometimes to a separate national body. The language your programme is delivered in, and any evidence of it that is expected, belongs to the programme. Health cover, registration on arrival, banking and proving an address each sit with their own office. Ask the international office to confirm who owns which before you start.

Ask about language explicitly rather than inferring it. More than one language may be in official use where you would be living, and what your course is delivered in does not settle what a form, a lease or an office will use. The international office can tell you what your programme expects and what support exists for everything around it, and that is a better basis than assumption.

Expect the adjustment itself to take time, and expect it to be uneven rather than steady. That is ordinary and not a sign that the decision was wrong. Ask what orientation, buddy or mentoring arrangements exist and whether you need to sign up in advance, because those are easiest to join at the start and awkward to join later. What adjusting to a new place usually feels like is worth reading before you travel rather than afterwards.

This page states no requirement, deadline or process, because none of those can be stated reliably from outside. They are set per programme and per intake, they differ according to the system an applicant was educated in, and they are revised. The only version worth acting on is the institution's own, read at the time you act on it rather than remembered from earlier.

In practice: go to the institution's site, find your exact programme, follow it to the admissions information that programme points to, then find the route documented for applicants with your background. Put anything unresolved into one message to the admissions office, naming the programme and saying where you studied. We verify only that an institution's official website is what we say it is, which is set out in how these pages are built and checked, and everything beyond that comes from the institution itself.

There is no amount on this page. Institutions in this system commonly publish a straightforward per-semester charge, at times with an extra element for students whose earlier qualification was obtained elsewhere, so the information is generally not hard to locate. The problem is that it is frequently published without saying which academic year it belongs to.

An amount detached from its period is not usable. You cannot tell whether you are looking at what applies now or at something that has simply not been updated, and a copy of it here would inherit exactly the same defect while adding distance from the source. Go to the institution's own fee page, look for the period stated alongside the charge, and if no period is stated, ask before budgeting. Fees are also only part of what a year of study costs, which is why fees and living costs are worth planning together rather than separately.