Pompeu Fabra University

Every institution has a rhythm, and it comes from mundane things: how many contact hours a week holds, how assessment is spread through the year, whether your group stays together, and how long it takes to get from where you live to where you are taught. Those vary between programmes under one roof, so a general impression of a university tells you very little about what your own week would actually look like.

Ask about your programme specifically. Which language each part of it is taught, assessed and administered in, and whether that is consistent throughout. Whether the sites you would use sit together or apart. What sport, societies and student organisations exist, and whether the university runs them or students do. What is available if you need academic or personal support, and who to approach for it. The student services office holds most of these answers.

The part nobody can arrange for you is the social one, and it usually takes longer than the administrative part. Our notes on building a circle in a new place describe what tends to work, which is mostly turning up repeatedly to the same thing. It is also worth asking which activities are organised by the institution and which run independently, because that determines who you would be dealing with.

Treat accommodation as its own project with its own deadlines. Ask what the university operates directly, what it merely lists, whether housing has a separate application and when that application opens and closes, and what happens if your place to study is confirmed after the housing process has run its course. Those questions belong to the accommodation office, and getting the answers in writing is worth the extra message.

On the open market the things that matter are contractual: the length of an agreement, deposit and guarantor arrangements, what the rent includes, how bills are divided, notice periods, and how repairs are handled. See a place, or have somebody you trust see it, before any money moves. An arrangement that resists being put in writing is telling you something, and the sensible response is to keep looking rather than to hurry.

Sharing brings its own arrangements, and they are easier to agree before you move in than after. Our note on handling money with flatmates covers the conversations most people postpone: who holds the agreement, how shared bills are divided, and what happens when somebody leaves early. The accommodation office can say what shared options exist here and how they are allocated.

Arriving from another country means dealing with several bodies at once, and the trick is knowing which one owns which question. The university decides how it categorises you for admission and for fees, how it treats qualifications you already hold, and what documents it wants from you. The relevant official authority in Spain decides everything to do with entry, residence and registration, and no summary can tell you what applies in your own case.

Health cover, insurance, banking and proof of address form a third group that is partly practical and partly formal, and responsibility for it can sit with either of the first two. Ask both rather than assuming. The international student office is the place to begin, and it is reasonable to ask which parts of the process it handles on your behalf, which it advises on, and which it has no part in at all.

Ask early about language, in the specific form of which language your own programme is taught in, assessed in and administered in, since those are separate questions. Practical, low-key advice on finding your feet in an unfamiliar city is collected in our notes on getting your bearings somewhere new, which are general by design and no substitute for what the institution and the official bodies tell you.

This page publishes no requirements, no deadlines, no tests and no rates. Admission rules belong to the university, they are revised, and they differ by programme, by level and by the route an applicant comes through, so the only sound method is to read them at their source. Start from the official website above, go to the exact programme and level you want, and identify which route applies to somebody with your background.

Then confirm it. A short message to the admissions office naming the programme, the level and the intake will produce an answer that belongs to your situation rather than one written for a general audience, and it is worth keeping. It is also worth asking what happens after an application goes in, since that part is rarely described in as much detail as the submission itself and is where most of the waiting happens.

If you want to know what U4S has and has not checked before publishing a page of this kind, our editorial policy sets out the boundary. We confirm an institution's official website, record the review, and leave admission rules to the institution, because those are the parts that change and the parts where a stale copy does real harm to somebody planning around it.

No fee figure appears on this page. Tuition is revised, it varies by programme and by level and by the category the university places an applicant in, and a figure copied onto a third-party page is a snapshot with no authority and no visible expiry. Pointing you at the source is more useful than handing you an amount that may already have moved by the time you read it.

Establish one thing before you read any figure at all: an amount may be quoted per credit rather than per year, which changes entirely what a total means, and until you know the basis you cannot turn a figure into a budget or compare it with anything else. Treat that as something to confirm rather than as a description of how things are arranged anywhere. Ask as well what sits outside tuition.

The questions in our note on what to ask before paying anything are written for exactly that call or email, and they are worth having in front of you when you make it. The amounts themselves belong on the university's own fee pages for the year in which you would start, read for your own programme, level and category, and confirmed with the office that publishes them.