Université de Montréal

Almost everything people mean by student life is decided below the level of the institution. A programme's teaching pattern, the number of people you study alongside, how much of the work is independent, how far you travel each day, and whether your friends come from your course or from somewhere else all shape a week far more than any general description of a university does.

So the questions worth asking are local ones. What does a normal week look like on this programme? Who organises clubs, sport and volunteering, and what does taking part cost? Is there a students' association with services of its own? What is there for somebody who arrives knowing nobody? Current students and the students' association will answer these more usefully than any prospectus. Our general material on how student life is usually structured is background for that conversation rather than a substitute for it.

Map the support arrangements early, while nothing is wrong. Advising, counselling, accessibility support, hardship help and international student advice usually sit in different offices with different ways in, and the moment you need one is a poor moment to start looking. Ask student services what exists and how a student reaches it, including outside teaching hours. Asking for help early is ordinary and expected at any institution.

Accommodation deserves attention before an offer arrives rather than after it. Find out whether the university has housing of its own, how and when you apply, whether applying depends on holding an offer, and what the process is for anyone who arrives without a place arranged. The accommodation office is the authority on all of it, and its answer is specific to this institution in a way that no general guide can be.

For renting privately, deal with the mechanics before the photographs: the length of the agreement, what is and is not included, the deposit arrangements, responsibility for repairs, and what happens if your circumstances change. Ask whether the institution lists or checks accommodation, and whether it advises students who run into trouble with a tenancy. And leave time, because looking for housing from another country adds steps that are easy to underestimate, and the week before teaching starts is how people end up signing things they regret.

An application from another country involves several separate systems, and mixing them up is the usual source of difficulty. The institution decides academic matters: which category it places you in, how it treats qualifications earned elsewhere, and what it needs to see and in what form. Official authorities decide entry, residence, working and health cover, and only they can state what applies to you. Nothing on this page should be treated as an answer in that second group.

The international student office is the right contact for the university's side, and it will usually say plainly where its remit ends. Put specific questions to it: what it handles, what it refers on, and what it recommends settling before travelling. Ask as well which language your teaching, your assessment and the institution's day-to-day administration are conducted in, and whether that varies by programme. It is a plain question with a definite answer, and much better asked now than discovered afterwards.

The rest is sequencing. Documents, banking, registration, insurance and travel each have their own lead times and they interact, so start with whatever takes longest. Adjusting to a different academic culture belongs to the same preparation: teaching styles, assessment conventions and the expected relationship between students and staff can differ between systems, and the institution's own orientation is where to learn its version.

This section offers a method, not criteria. What an institution asks of applicants is set per programme and per intake and is updated, so any copy of it elsewhere describes a moment that may already have passed. Read the official admissions pages for the specific programme, for the specific intake, and treat that as the only version that counts.

Then close the gaps deliberately. Write down what you cannot determine from the published pages, ask the admissions office directly, and keep the answers. Where a recruiter, a forum or a directory disagrees with the institution, the institution wins. U4S makes no assessment of the university, is not affiliated with it and does not write on its behalf; how U4S works is set out separately, and this page is preparation for asking the institution a better question.

No fee figure appears here. Institutions publish amounts for a defined period and change them, and what a given student is charged depends on their particular circumstances, so a number carried into a directory would be unreliable at exactly the point where it mattered most. Showing nothing is the honest option when the alternative is a figure nobody can trace.

Rates may be published per programme rather than for the institution as a whole, and which of them applies may depend on the category the institution places a student in. Neither should be assumed from outside, and both are worth confirming before any commitment. It helps to understand how fee categories are usually set out before working out which pages apply to you, and to keep living costs on a separate line of the plan. Finish on the institution's own fee pages for the relevant year, and check them again before you pay.