University of Antwerp

Ask what a normal week looks like, and ask someone who is having one. Timetables, the balance between taught hours and independent work, when assessment lands, and how far people travel between home and teaching are the things that actually shape a student year, and they differ from programme to programme within the same institution. Prospectuses and photographs cannot answer any of it. Current students and the programme office can.

For everything outside teaching, the student services office or the students' union is the place to start. Establish how associations and societies are organised, whether joining is tied to a particular point in the calendar, and whether sport, music and volunteering run through the institution or through the surrounding city. Ask what support is available for the difficult stretches as well, and how a student reaches it, because that route is much easier to learn while nothing is wrong. Staying well while studying is background reading; the local answers come from the offices themselves.

Accommodation deserves its own timeline and its own set of questions. It is usually handled by a different office from admissions, and being accepted onto a programme does not mean a room comes with it. Establish first which arrangement applies here: housing run by the institution, housing it helps students find, or a private market students deal with themselves.

Then establish the timing. When does an accommodation application open, and does it depend on holding an offer already? Is there a queue, and what happens to the people at the back of it? When does the private market here typically move, and how far ahead do students normally begin looking? The accommodation office is the right place to ask, and asking early costs nothing.

Finally, read the terms rather than the photographs: how long the contract runs, what is payable before you move in, what is refundable, what is included, and who is responsible for repairs. Anything committed to from abroad, sight unseen, deserves particular care. The reason to arrange all this early is unglamorous but real, in that an address is what much of the remaining administration depends on. Our housing orientation covers the general sequence.

An applicant arriving from another country is dealing with two different kinds of body, and they should not be confused. The institution handles the academic side: whether the qualification you hold is recognised for the programme, what language the programme is taught in, and what evidence of language an applicant is asked to give. Establish the language of instruction for your own programme rather than for the institution generally, and establish separately which language your day-to-day administration will run in, since these are distinct questions.

Official authorities handle entry, residence, work and health cover, and this page states nothing about any of them. The international student office is the practical starting point: it can identify which authority to approach for what, say what the institution requires from you and by when, and clarify what it does on your behalf. Confirm each specific with the authority that owns it, allow time for it, and re-check before you travel. Preparing for a move abroad lists the categories worth working through in advance.

No admission requirements are listed on this page, and nothing should be inferred from their absence in either direction. What applies depends on the programme, the level, and the qualification you already hold, and the institution is the only party that can state it. Its own admissions pages, reachable from the official website above, are the primary source.

In practice: choose the programme, find its page on the official site, read the conditions attached to it, and note anything ambiguous about your own case. Then ask the admissions office those exact questions and keep the reply. Treat third-party summaries, this one included, as secondhand rather than authoritative. Re-read the programme page before submitting, because official pages are updated more often than the places that quote them.

You will not find a fee figure here. Fees are revised, they differ by programme and by category of student, and an amount set down on a page like this would look authoritative long after it had stopped being accurate. Pointing you at the source is more useful than guessing on your behalf.

There is a point to check rather than assume: the amount may be set by an authority above the institution rather than by the institution itself, and it may differ according to the category a student falls into. If that turns out to be the case, the question worth asking is which category the institution places you in, and what that means in practice for someone in your position.

Budget the fee and the cost of living as separate lines, since one does not predict the other, and ask what else is payable beyond the fee itself. Managing money as a student covers the habits that make that easier. The method for finding official figures is set out in our note on checking fees at source. Whatever you conclude, take the amounts themselves from the institution's own fee pages, for the year you would actually be starting.