Nazarbayev University

Student life is shaped by structure more than by atmosphere: how the teaching week is laid out, whether most students live close to where they study or travel in each day, how much of the timetable is fixed for you, and how societies, sport and volunteering are organised. These things often differ between subject areas within the same institution, so a general impression is rarely worth much. Ask the student services office what an ordinary week looks like on the course you are considering, and ask whether current students can be contacted through official channels.

It also helps to understand what the calendar does around teaching: when the year is busiest, when services run at reduced hours, and what happens during the stretches when many students travel home. Building a routine that survives the quiet weeks is most of what settles people into a new place, and the general habits behind that are set out in our student life section.

Locate the support you would need before you need it. Find out who to approach about health, counselling, disability adjustments, quiet space, and academic difficulty, whether those sit in a single office or several, and which languages each service can work in. Knowing the name of the desk you would walk to is the practical form of pastoral care, and our wellbeing pages cover why asking early tends to work better than waiting.

Treat accommodation as a separate task from the application itself. Establish whether the institution offers housing of its own, how places are allocated and whether any allocation is conditional on the stage your application has reached. Establish also whether the accommodation office is the same office that handles admissions, since a decision on a place to study does not by itself secure a bed.

The details that decide whether a room actually works are dull ones: what the contract covers, what is billed separately, how long the agreement runs against the length of teaching, what happens in the periods when teaching stops, what deposit arrangements apply and how they are returned. Ask for the terms in writing and read them before committing to anything. If you will be looking at the private market instead, our student housing section sets out the questions worth asking of any landlord anywhere.

Arranging this early matters because the supply of rooms near any institution is finite and the students competing for them are working to the same calendar. Late arrangements narrow your choices to whatever is left, which is usually the option furthest from where you need to be or the one with the least favourable terms. Give yourself enough time to compare, to ask questions and to walk away from something that does not suit.

If you would be arriving from another country, group the questions rather than taking them one at a time. The academic group covers whether your existing qualifications are considered for the course you want, the language in which teaching and assessment are conducted, and whether any evidence of language ability is asked for. The administrative group covers which documents you would need to produce, in what form, and which of them are prepared before travelling rather than after arrival. The admissions and international offices answer the academic group; only they can tell you what belongs in the other.

Everything touching entry, stay, permission to work, health cover, tax or registration after arrival belongs to the relevant official authority, not to this page and not to any summary you read second-hand. The international office is the right place to ask which authority handles which question and in what order to approach them, and it is worth confirming what the office can and cannot do on your behalf.

The rest is preparation rather than paperwork: banking and money transfer, a phone connection, how you will get from the point of arrival to where you will sleep, and what the institution runs by way of orientation. Ask whether there is a designated contact for students arriving from abroad, and whether anything is expected of you in the days after you arrive. Our guide to preparing for study abroad covers the sequence in general terms.

This page cannot tell you what you need in order to be admitted, and any page that offers to do so for a specific institution is worth treating with caution. Requirements are set by the institution, they vary by course and by level of study, and they can differ again according to where your existing qualifications come from. The only version that binds anyone is the one published by the institution itself.

The practical method is straightforward: start from the official website, find the admissions section for the level you want to study at, then find the page for the specific course rather than stopping at the general one. Note what it asks for, note what it does not mention, and send the remaining questions to the admissions office by email so that the answer arrives in writing. Where an answer given verbally matters to your decision, ask for it again in writing.

Keep a record as you go: which page you read, when you read it and what it said. Pages are updated, and a saved copy of what applied at the time you applied is more useful than a memory of it. If someone offers to handle the process for you, establish first whether the institution recognises them, since the institution is the only party that can confirm what it accepts.

You will not find a fee figure on this page. We publish what we have verified, and what we have verified here is the official website rather than a price. Figures move, they differ between courses and between levels of study, and a number copied from a third-party page or from an older prospectus can be wrong in ways that are impossible to spot from the outside.

Some things are worth checking rather than assuming. An amount you see quoted may cover a full year of study or only a shorter period, so the unit matters as much as the number. And a state-supported place may be charged differently from a fee-paying place, so which of those an institution would consider you for is a question to put to it directly rather than to infer. Ask also what the figure includes and what is billed separately.

Go to the institution's own fee pages for the year in which you would start, and read them alongside the cost of living where you would be studying, since the two are separate calculations. If anything is ambiguous, ask the office that issues the invoice rather than the one that answers general enquiries. Our guide to checking official tuition fees sets out how to confirm a figure at source.