Reykjavik University

The useful questions about student life are narrow ones. How is the teaching week arranged on the programme you are considering? Is assessment continuous or concentrated? How much work is done in groups? Does the programme include practical periods away from the teaching buildings? Do students move through it as a cohort or separately? Ask the institution these directly, because the answer for one programme rarely describes another, and impressions of a place tell you very little about the shape of your own week.

Around teaching sits everything else, and it is worth asking about too: whether clubs, sport and events are run by the institution or by a separate student organisation, how a new student joins them, whether there is an introductory period at the start, and which facilities are open to everyone enrolled. Establish which language teaching and assessment use, and which language administration uses, because those are separate questions with separate answers and both matter daily. If you are counting on work alongside study, ask the international office and the relevant official authority whether that is open to you at all. Broader patterns are set out in our overview of student life.

Start accommodation early, and start it in parallel with the application rather than after it. Establish who provides housing in relation to this institution: the institution itself, a separate housing organisation, the private market, or some combination of those. Establish when the process opens and how that lines up with the admissions calendar. Ask how allocation works, what an application needs, and what is left for someone applying late. Ask, too, what students who arrive with nothing arranged usually end up doing, so that you know what the worst case looks like before you risk meeting it.

Then read the agreement rather than the photographs: what period it covers, what is included, what is billed separately, what deposit is expected and how it is returned, whether the room is furnished, notice and guest rules, and what happens outside teaching periods. Ask how long it takes to get from the accommodation on offer to where you would be taught. If you are coming from another country, ask the international office what can be settled before you travel and what has to wait. A general version of these questions is in our guide to finding housing abroad. The day-to-day side of sharing is covered in shared student accommodation.

An applicant arriving from another country is working through categories, and the categories look much the same everywhere even though the answers never do. Entry and residence formalities. Registration once you are there. Health cover, and how it is obtained. Whether qualifications you already hold need assessment or translation, and by whom. Whether your programme expects evidence of language ability. Everyday administration, such as banking. Whether working alongside study is available to you. This page answers none of them, because none of them belong to it.

Each belongs either to the institution's international office or to an official authority, so ask both where responsibility is unclear, ask about your own situation rather than the general rule, and keep the answers you are given. Ask how long things take, not only what they involve. Beyond the paperwork, expect some academic conventions to differ from what you are used to in ways that are rarely written down anywhere, from how teaching staff are addressed to what independent study is assumed to mean. That adjustment is worth reading about in advance in adapting to a new academic culture.

There are no entry criteria on this page. What is asked for is set by the institution, varies between programmes and intakes, and is revised, so the version that matters is the one published by the institution for the cycle you are applying in. Read it fully rather than in summary, and take anything ambiguous to the admissions office instead of interpreting it yourself. If you were educated in another system, ask how what you already hold will be considered, and by whom.

It helps to reduce the rest to a short list of plain questions: where does the application go, what does the cycle look like, what documents are expected and in what form, does anything need certifying or translating, how is a decision communicated, and what happens if something arrives late or missing? Keep your own copies and your own dates. Treat any claim about entry that does not come from the institution as a reason to ask rather than as an answer, which is the standard we hold ourselves to and describe in how we source and check pages.

No figure appears here. Fees belong to the institution, they are revised, and they can differ by programme, by level and by the category an applicant is placed in, which makes any amount copied onto a page like this unreliable by the time somebody reads it. The caution to carry into any fee page is a simple one: what is displayed may be tuition or it may be a registration charge, and the period it covers may be a semester rather than a year. Read the label and the period together, and confirm both with the institution.

Then go to the institution's own fee pages for the year you would start, and ask admissions or the international office to confirm which category applies to you, what the amount covers, what period it covers, what sits outside it and when it falls due. Ask what happens if your circumstances change partway through, and ask what living there is likely to cost, which is a separate matter the institution does not set. Whether any support arrangements exist, and who they apply to, is another question for the institution rather than an assumption; the general shape of that topic is in scholarships, grants and student support.