ETH Zurich

Student life anywhere is built out of ordinary variables: the shape of the timetable, the distance between where you sleep and where you are taught, whether assessment is concentrated or spread out, and how many hours the week has left once study and travel are accounted for. Those things vary by programme as much as by institution, so the answers that matter to you are the ones attached to your own course rather than to the place in general.

Ask the student services team and the student association what actually exists and how it is entered: associations and societies, sport, peer support, representation, and whatever runs during the induction period. Ask what support is available if a term goes badly, who is entitled to it, and whether it has to be arranged in advance. That last question is the one people wish they had asked, and knowing when to ask for help is a skill worth having before you need it.

A social base does not assemble itself, particularly where a lot of students commute or where a missed start is hard to recover from. Deciding in advance on a couple of regular commitments, and keeping them through the first difficult stretch, does more than any amount of good intention. Building a circle in a new place takes a while for almost everyone, which is worth knowing before it happens to you.

Housing deserves attention before almost anything else, because it has the longest lead time and the fewest second chances. Establish whether the institution provides or brokers accommodation at all, whether that runs as its own application with its own timetable, and what the accommodation office recommends for someone arriving from elsewhere. Ask them directly what people in your situation usually end up doing, and what tends to go wrong for those who leave it late.

If you end up in the private market, the essentials are the same everywhere: understand the length and terms of what you are committing to, what is payable before you move in and on what conditions any of it comes back, who is responsible for repairs, and how a disagreement would be resolved. Do not transfer money for a place nobody has seen. If you will be sharing, settle the domestic arrangements in advance, since living alongside other students goes better when the boring questions were answered early.

Coming from another country adds a set of separate processes, each with its own owner, and this page names only the categories. Permission to enter and to remain belongs to the relevant official authority, and the international office can tell you which authority that is. Recognition of your prior qualification belongs to the admissions and international offices. The language of instruction, and any evidence of it, belongs to the programme. Health cover, registration after arrival, and the practicalities of banking and proving an address are each their own item with their own office behind them.

Language is worth a direct question rather than an assumption. More than one language may be in official use in the setting you would be moving into, and the language a programme is taught in does not necessarily govern administration, housing paperwork or public offices. Ask the international office what your programme expects and what daily life will require, and ask what support exists for it. Working through language barriers is a practical matter rather than a talent, and it improves with preparation.

The other thing to establish is order. Some of these processes depend on documents produced by others, and none of the offices involved coordinates with the rest on your behalf. Ask the international office what sequence they recommend and what usually takes longest, then confirm anything to do with entry, residence or recognition with the official authority that decides it. An institution can describe such a process accurately and still have no power over its outcome.

There are no requirements on this page, and that is not an oversight. What applies depends on the programme, the level, the intake and the system you were educated in, and it is revised between cycles. Any version of it that reaches you second-hand should be treated as unverified, including versions that look authoritative and versions that agree with each other.

Work from the institution's own site instead. Start at the programme you actually want, follow it to the admissions material attached to that programme, then look specifically for the route that applies to applicants with your educational background, which is usually documented apart from the standard one. Collect whatever remains ambiguous and send it to the admissions office in a single message stating the programme and your background. Asking is normal, and the answer you receive from them is the only one that counts.

No amount is published here. Institutions in this system commonly do publish a clear per-semester charge, sometimes with an additional element for students whose prior qualification was completed elsewhere, so the information is usually available and reasonably plain to read. The difficulty lies elsewhere: such amounts are frequently published without stating which academic year they apply to.

That omission matters more than it looks. An amount with no period attached cannot be relied upon, because you cannot tell from the page whether you are reading something current or something left over from an earlier cycle. Reproducing it here would only add another undated copy at one further remove from the source. Go to the institution's own fee page, look for the period the charge is stated for, and if none is stated, ask before you plan around it. The questions worth asking before any payment apply here as much as anywhere.