Harbin Institute of Technology

Ask about the week, not the institution. How teaching is timetabled, how much of the workload is independent, how assessment falls across the year, and how far apart the places you would need to be sit from one another are all decided at programme level. They shape daily life far more than anything said about an institution as a whole, and they can vary between two courses under the same roof. The department running your course is the right place to ask.

Everything outside teaching is worth a separate set of questions. Establish what societies, sport, student associations and volunteering exist, when they open to new students, how joining works and whether anything carries a cost. Ask the student services office how a newcomer is expected to find their way in, since the answer is usually a specific process rather than a general invitation. The part about meeting people is covered generally in our community pages.

Language is a practical matter to settle in advance. Establish the language of teaching for your programme, the language used for administration and student services, and what preparation or support the institution offers for either. Those are three questions that can have three answers, and the international or student services office is the place to put them. If you would rather think it through before writing, our guide to handling language barriers is for that.

The single most useful early question is whether the institution offers accommodation to students in your position, and if so whether that offer is guaranteed or applied for. The second is when the application runs, because housing timelines are frequently independent of admission timelines and can open earlier or close sooner than people expect. The accommodation office is the only reliable source on both, and neither is safe to infer from what is true elsewhere.

If you will be looking privately, prepare differently. Establish what an agreement typically commits you to, what is usually paid in advance, what a rent figure includes and what is billed on top, and how far ahead searching normally begins for the intake you are joining. Many accommodation offices will tell you what students searching privately generally encounter even when they do not arrange anything themselves.

Two things to plan rather than discover. The first is the gap between arriving and a contract starting; ask what students in that position usually do. The second is that the money attached to housing goes well beyond rent, taking in deposits, utilities, furnishing and the travel between where you live and where you study. The general shape of that budgeting is covered in our money section, which names no amounts.

Coming from another country means several separate processes running at once under different owners. The institution handles admission and enrolment. Recognition of the qualifications you already hold may be handled by the institution or by a separate body. Anything concerning permission to study or to remain belongs to the relevant official authority. Working out which body owns which question, early, saves more time than any other piece of preparation.

We state none of those requirements here, because they turn on your own circumstances and on rules that are not ours to describe. The international student office is the institution's own contact point for applicants arriving from elsewhere and can tell you what it handles and what it expects you to arrange. For anything about entry, stay or official registration, ask the authority that issues it and work from what they tell you rather than from a summary.

The categories to work through are practical: documents and the form they must take; whether translation or certification is expected, and by whom; health cover and how it is arranged for someone in your situation; the registrations that ordinary daily life requires after arrival; and any orientation the institution runs for new arrivals. Ask which of these the institution supports and which sit entirely with you. The settling-in side is covered generally in our wellbeing pages.

You will find no requirements, deadlines or selection information on this page. Those vary by programme and level, depend on an applicant's own background, and are revised between intakes. Putting them here would only produce something that looks authoritative and may not apply to you. Instead, here is how to reach the version that does.

Work from the institution's own admissions pages, and narrow the question first: the specific programme, the level of study, and the route that applies to someone in your circumstances. Requirements written for one route regularly do not hold for another, and pages found through a search may belong to a different intake altogether. If a page does not make clear which applicants it addresses, ask the admissions office rather than assume it addresses you.

Check as well whether any step in the process is handled outside the institution, because anything owned elsewhere has its own timing and can end up setting when you need to begin. Keep your own note of who told you what and when, since admissions and the international office often hold different parts of a single answer and the difference matters when the two seem to disagree. Our guide on when to ask for help covers the general case.

No fee figure appears here. Tuition depends on programme, level, year of entry and the category a student is placed in, and a number lifted from elsewhere becomes unreliable quickly. We would rather point you at the source than hand you something that looks plausible and may turn out not to describe your situation at all.

On the institution's fee pages, establish first which student category any published amount applies to, since a figure commonly belongs to one group and not another, and reading the wrong line is the usual mistake. It may also be the case that accommodation and insurance charges are listed on the same page as tuition without being tuition, so check what each line covers before treating a total as the cost of studying. Where the page is silent on either question, ask rather than infer.

Then place tuition in the wider budget it belongs to, since housing, daily living, materials, travel and the expense of setting up in the first weeks all sit outside it. Our note on grants and student support basics describes the structure of that question without naming amounts. For the amounts themselves, use the institution's own fee pages for the year you would start, and confirm anything unclear with its admissions office.