University of California, Santa Cruz

How a term feels comes down mostly to ordinary things: the shape of the academic calendar, the distance between where students sleep and where they are taught, how assessment is spread through the year, and whether student organisations are run by students themselves or by the institution. None of that is visible in a photograph, and it varies by programme as much as by institution. Ask about your own likely week rather than about student life as an abstraction, and ask people who are living it now.

Support matters as much as social life, and it is worth knowing before you need it what exists and who runs it: academic advice, accessibility arrangements, counselling or wellbeing services, and whoever a student turns to when something goes wrong outside class. The student services office can describe what it offers and how a student reaches it, and the academic department can explain who to approach about teaching itself. Knowing that in advance costs nothing, which is the whole argument for asking early rather than late.

Ask first what the institution itself provides, and to whom. Housing operated by a university is a different thing from housing it merely lists, and eligibility, application windows and the order in which places are allocated are all set locally. An offer to study is not automatically an offer of a room, and the accommodation office is the only body that can tell you how those relate here, what it advises for anyone not allocated a place, and how far ahead the process runs.

Ask next about the private market, because many students meet it sooner or later. What paperwork is normal, whether a guarantor tends to be wanted, what a deposit is held against, how long a contract runs and what happens to it outside teaching periods are all things to establish before you commit rather than after. Looking for a room from another country is a slower process than looking locally, which is the main reason to begin it early.

Then ask about the ordinary week. How people travel between home and teaching, how much of the day that takes, and whether the arrangement you are considering would leave you cut off from everyone else. Sharing solves some problems and creates others, and living alongside other students rewards a plain conversation about cleaning, guests and money before anyone signs anything.

Everything specific here belongs to the international student office and to the relevant official authority, so treat the following as headings for a list you keep yourself. Recognition of the qualification you hold. The language in which your programme is taught, examined and administered, and any evidence of language it asks for. Whether any permission to enter and study applies to you, and which body would decide it. The category the institution places you in for fees, and how it decides. Health cover, and the office that can say what applies. Anything the institution expects you to complete once you arrive.

Do not infer any of it from what a student at another institution, or in another intake, was told. Ask the international office what it decides and what it merely passes on, and ask the official body directly about anything that touches documents, permission or timing. Written answers are worth more than remembered ones, and they are worth collecting well before you travel. Handling language day to day is a separate practical matter from whichever language your teaching happens to use.

There are no entry requirements on this page, because requirements are specific to a programme, to a qualification and to an applicant's circumstances, and because institutions revise them. The institution's own admissions pages are the authoritative version, and the page for your exact course and level is the one to read rather than any summary written by somebody else.

Where those pages leave a gap, write to the admissions office and keep what it sends back. Useful things to establish include how your qualification is assessed, what has to be submitted and in what format, how the sequence from application to decision runs, whether anything separate applies to applicants coming from abroad, and who to contact if your situation does not fit a standard route. Nobody is penalised for putting a clear question to an admissions office.

This page carries no fee figure. Fees differ by programme and by level, and by the category an institution assigns to an applicant, and they are set on a cycle the institution controls, so a figure copied here would mislead somebody almost immediately. Note too that what is published may not be a tuition rate at all: it may be a total cost of attendance, a net price estimated from a household's circumstances, or the output of an interactive estimator. Any of those can be checked, but none of them can be assumed.

So establish what you are looking at before you plan around it. Confirm the programme, the intake and your own category against the institution's official fee pages, and ask the finance or admissions office whenever the basis of a figure is not stated on the page itself. How fees are usually structured is worth reading first, because a headline figure and the cost of a year of living are different questions that are easily confused.