Nanjing University

It helps to ask about student life in two halves. The first is the shape of the week itself: how many hours are timetabled, how much unsupervised work sits behind them, whether laboratory or studio commitments fix particular days, how assessment is distributed through the year, and how long the journey is between accommodation and teaching. All of that is a property of a programme rather than of an institution, and two subjects at the same university can answer it very differently.

The second half is everything around the teaching, and the student services office is where that question belongs. What organisations, sport and societies exist, whether they are run centrally or by individual faculties, how someone joins without knowing anybody, and what if anything is arranged for new students before teaching starts. Ask which of it the university runs and which of it simply exists locally and admits students, because from a distance the two look identical.

One further question is worth asking while nothing has gone wrong: what support exists if it does, academically or personally, and which office administers it. Write down where that answer lives. The wellbeing section describes the kinds of help students commonly end up looking for, and how to recognise the point at which asking is more sensible than waiting.

Housing rewards early attention more than any other part of a move, because almost every other arrangement can be adjusted later and this one largely cannot. Establish first what the institution operates or signposts, then who is eligible, then how places are allocated and in which order, then whether a place on a programme has to be confirmed before a room can be requested, and finally when a decision is normally communicated. The accommodation office owns all five answers.

Keep a private search running in parallel. The questions there are about the agreement rather than the room: who it is with, what is required at signing, what is paid in advance of moving in, how a deposit is held and what would reduce it, which charges fall outside the rent, and whether the whole thing can be arranged from abroad or needs you to be present. Arranging housing from another country describes how that usually works in practice.

If you will be sharing, settle the domestic arithmetic before moving in rather than after: whose name each account sits in, how shared costs are divided, and what happens if somebody leaves early. Sorting money out with flatmates covers the conversations worth having at the start, which are considerably easier then than later.

An application from another country divides cleanly if you let it. On one side sits everything the institution decides: how your qualifications are looked at, what language evidence it expects, admission, enrolment and academic registration. On the other sits everything decided by the relevant official authority, which is entry, residence and whatever attaches to them. Between the two sit health cover, banking, proof of address and any registration expected after arrival, and those often depend on the order they are done in.

Ask the international office about its side and treat the reply as authoritative there and nowhere else. Where it points to an official authority, that authority's own guidance is the only guidance worth acting on, and nothing published by anyone else, this page included, can stand in for it. A specific question about your own circumstances gets a specific answer, so write those circumstances down in full before you ask anything.

Keep every written reply you receive, from either side, and note the date it arrived and who sent it. Arrangements change, staff change, and a saved message is the difference between a conversation and an argument. Preparing for a move abroad sets out the order in which most of these pieces are usually settled, which is rarely the order they occur to you in.

No requirement, date or measure appears here, and none should be inferred from the absence of one. What applies depends on the programme, on the level of study, and on the applicant category the institution places you in, and a single university commonly runs more than one admission route at a time. So the work is not to gather criteria but to identify which route is yours, and then to read that route on the institution's own admissions pages and nowhere else.

Treat the admissions office as the authority behind those pages. Ask in writing about anything ambiguous, keep the answer, and ask what happens after an application is submitted: how and when you would be told, what a conditional outcome means in their wording, what they would need next, and who to contact if something in your file is unusual. Then read the live official page once more before you act, because it is revised by the institution rather than by anyone quoting it.

This profile shows no tuition figure. U4S publishes an amount only when it has been read from the institution's own published source and recorded alongside the programme, the level of study, the applicant category and the academic year it applies to. Those fields are not decoration; they are what allows a reader to tell whether the amount describes them at all. That work has not been done here, so nothing is shown, and no rough impression is offered in its place either.

Two cautions are worth carrying to the official page. Which student category an amount applies to is the first thing to establish, since a single page may set out several and the difference between them is not always signalled clearly. And accommodation or insurance charges may be listed on the same page without being tuition, in which case an amount shown there could describe something other than teaching, or leave out something that will still be billed. Both are questions for the office that publishes the page.

Read the fee pages yourself, for your own programme and applicant category and for the academic year in which you would start, and confirm what you find with that office. Fees set against the cost of living explains why an accurate fee is still only part of what a year of study asks of anyone financially. What to ask about reductions and support sits in the basics of grants and student support.